Armenian Genocide 1915

Editorial: Discrediting denial in Ankara

2009-07-09T21:19:00.001-04:00

Published: Friday July 03, 2009 http://www.reporter.am

Advocate acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, and you risk prosecution and imprisonment for the crime – yes, it's still a crime – of insulting Turkey. If you're Armenian and you do it, you also risk getting killed, as we learned in January 2007 when Hrant Dink was shot dead.

That said, it's also true that open discussion of the Armenian Genocide is more common in Turkey today than it has been for decades. Mainstream newspapers like Radikal write about it, and respected public figures acknowledge it – like the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who has had repeatedly to answer charges of insulting Turkishness.

Last week, a British peer, Lord Avebury, and historian Ara Sarafian set out for Ankara, a Turkish translation of the British parliamentary Blue Book on the Armenian Genocide in hand. (See story.) The stated purpose was to engage the Turkish parliament on a debate it had originated.

Four years ago, the Turkish Grand National Assembly sent a petition to the British Parliament, asking it to repudiate the Blue Book, which it had commissioned in 1916. The Foreign Office wrote back to say it saw no reason to do so. A group of British members of Parliament and peers wrote back to say the Blue Book is solid, but let's talk about it and hear your concerns.

The Turkish parliament dropped the matter. No response was forthcoming to the British legislators who had agreed to engage the Turkish legislators.

Instead of dropping the issue, Lord Avebury and Mr. Sarafian took the matter to Turkey.

Addressing the Turkish Grand National Assembly in April, President Barack Obama had urged the parliament to come to terms with Turkey's past as it relates to Armenians. He had reminded his audience of how America is better for having come to terms with some of the shameful parts of its history.

But the Grand National Assembly has yet to heed Mr. Obama's advice. And, indeed, no member of the Turkish parliament joined the foreign diplomats and other distinguished guests who attended the presentation made by Lord Avebury and Mr. Sarafian in Ankara last week. The absence even of members of the pro-Kurdish party MEP is an indication of the prevalence and extent of anti-Armenian pressure brought to bear against politicians in Turkey.

Present or absent, the members of parliament got to read about the presentation in the Turkish press, which covered it. It is perhaps an indication of the damage to the denial effort inflicted by this presentation that a retired ambassador held a news conference to denounce it.

In going to Turkey and engaging the establishment, we offer messages that are broadcast, if at all, through the filter of the Turkish media. It is not by any means an even playing field, or a safe one. And it's counterproductive to appear to engage in a debate over whether the events of 1915–17 constituted genocide. That is a contrived debate, and to their credit, Lord Avebury and Mr. Sarafian were able to avoid the appearance of engaging in such a debate.

What their modest presentation did was not simply to offer in Turkish an important resource for people who want to learn the truth about the Armenian Genocide. More importantly, it showed the bankruptcy of the Turkish denial machine.

The leaders of the denial effort had put the Turkish legislature into an embarrassing position, and that was clear: they had persuaded the legislature to denounce a book – the Blue Book – on grounds that were patently and demonstrably false. In demonstrating that the case made by deniers was dishonest and disingenuous, Lord Avebury and Mr. Sarafian helped discredit the denial effort itself. We commend them for that.

Meanwhile, this initiative may serve as a good opportunity for Armenian individuals as well as organizations to ask themselves whether they have anything to do in Turkey. The answer may not always be affirmative, but the question is certainly worth exploring.

Technorati Tags: ankara,armenian genocide,genocide denial

Armenian Genocide Timeline: 1915

2009-06-12T15:13:00.000-04:00

1/1/1915
The Ittihad representative of Bursa reports to the Ittihad Central Committee that local criminals and bandits have been registered in the Special Organization.
1/1/1915
Nuri, the vice-governor of Gavar District in Van Province, receives orders from the military governor to kill the Armenian soldiers in the Turkish Army who were stationed in his district.
1/5/1915
The Turkish government publicly charges that Armenian bakers in the army bakeries of Sivas were poisoning the bread of the Turkish forces. The bakers are cruelly beaten, despite the fact that a group of doctors prove the charge to be false by examining the bread and even eating it. As this marks an attempt on the part of the government to incite massacre, the government does not rescind the charge.
1/8/1915
Turkish and Kurdish chetes (Halil Pasha's "First Corps") attack Armenian and Assyrian villages in northwest Persia. They remain around the city of Tavriz (Tabriz) and the city of Urmia from January 8 until January 29, 1915. From Urmia alone, more than 18,000 Armenians, together with many Assyrians and even Persian Muslims, flee to the Caucasus.
1/12/1915
Ahmed Muammer, the governor-general of Sivas Province, orders the destruction of Tavra-Koy and other strategically located villages around the city of Sivas in order to make future defense impossible for the Armenians. Inside the city of Sivas strategically-located buildings were requisitioned.
1/16/1915
The last actions of the Battle of Sarikamish are reported. The Turkish army is totally defeated and almost destroyed with a loss of 70,000 men out of 85,000.
1/19/1915
Enver arrives in Sivas by automobile from Erzerum after his calamitous defeat at Sarikamish. He instructs the Army to accept only his orders and none hereafter from the German commanders and to draft at once all those deferred in the 20 to 40 age group, along with all males between the ages of 18 and 20 and 45 to 52.
1/22/1915
Enver arrives in Constantinople by automobile from Sivas. After his arrival, he makes a speech congratulating the Armenians for admirably doing their duty on the Caucasian Front and elsewhere. Enver seeks to lull the Armenians of Constantinople who had not yet experienced the general persecutions in the provinces because of the presence of a large European community in the city.
1/23/1915
Enver, now actively Minister of War again, issues a general order to shoot all persons resisting his orders.
2/2/1915
Talaat advises German Ambassador Count Hans von Wangenheim that the war is the only propitious moment to conclude the Armenian Question.
2/10/1915
S. Pasdermadjian, the Second Director of the Ottoman Bank, is murdered in the presence of German Major-General Posseldt, who reported that no investigation was carried or was any attempt made by the Turkish authorities to apprehend the guilty parties.
2/10/1915
Enver's brother-in-law, Hafiz Hakki, dies of typhus and is replaced by Mahmud Kamil as Commander of the Third Army (Erzerum).
2/14/1915
Tahir Jevdet, the governor-general of Van Province, is reported saying that the government must begin finishing the Armenians in Van at once.
2/16/1915
The vice-governor of Mush orders 70 gendarmes to attack the village of Koms and to kill the Armenian Dashnak leader Rupen and all persons with him. Rupen and his companions resist and eventually escape to the Caucasus.
2/19/1915
Talaat, Osman Bedri, and other Ittihadist leaders decide in a meeting that should Allied naval ships force the Dardanelles, the Turks would burn Constantinople, blow up the Hagia Sophia, and slaughter the Christian inhabitants. Kerosene is distributed to all police stations in Constantinople for ready use in such an eventuality.
2/21/1915
An attack by chetes on the village of Purk near Shabin-Karahisar results in looting, murder, rape.
2/26/1915
Vramian, an Armenian parliamentary deputy from Van, writes Talaat advising him to remove the large number of chetes in Van Province.
2/27/1915
In Sivas Province a general attack is reported on many Armenian villages accompanied by raping, looting, and an increasingly larger number of killings.
2/27/1915
In the village of Chomaklu in Kayseri Province and in other places, the government demands all weapons from the Armenians.
3/1/1915
In Marash, the Armenians in the Turkish Army are deprived of their uniforms and arms.
3/3/1915
A dispatch from the Ittihad Central Committee is released announcing the decision to exterminate the Armenians.
3/3/1915
Armenian soldiers in the Erzerum army area are deprived of their uniforms and arms.
3/3/1915
The British decide to attack the Dardanelles.
3/5/1915
In Van Province, regular gendarmes and chetes are reported attacking many villages inhabited by Armenians and Assyrians.
3/7/1915
A search for weapons is conducted in Iskenderun (Alexandretta) and a mass arrest of Armenians carried out.
3/9/1915
Chetes and regular Army units attack Zeitun. Six Turkish gendarmes are killed by individuals resisting the attack.
3/12/1915
Massacres and robberies are carried in Alashkert District as part of a general campaign led by the chetes forces against the Armenian villages of the district.
3/12/1915
Mass arrests of Armenians are carried out in Dortyol and a public announcement is made that those arrested would be sent to work on road construction near Aleppo. They are never heard of again.
3/12/1915
Enver leaves for Berlin to see Kaiser Wilhelm II.
3/13/1915
A traveling commission of parliamentary deputies tours all the cities of Anatolia. The commission includes Dr. Fazil Berki, parliamentary deputy from Chankri, Ubedulla, parliamentary deputy from Smyrna, and Behaeddin Shakir, member of the Central Committee of the Ittihad Party. They address the Turkish population in the mosques describing the Armenians as internal enemies which must destroyed.
3/13/1915
In Sivas Province the population in all the Armenian villages is disarmed.
3/14/1915
Sahag, the Catholicos of Cilicia, advises the Armenians of Zeitun not to resist under any conditions.
3/16/1915
Russian forces advance between Urmia and Tavriz.
3/18/1915
An Allied attack on the Dardanelles begins.
3/18/1915
In Zeitun, the Turkish forces arrest many of the remaining Armenian notables and intellectuals whom they torture and finally kill.
3/19/1915
Six Armenian soldiers from the town of Gurun are publicly hanged in Sivas to frighten the Armenian population.
3/19/1915
Greek recruits are massacred near Smyrna.
3/20/1915
Omer Naji, a circulating Ittihad propagandist, travels to Aleppo, Adana and nearby towns to arouse the Muslims.
3/24/1915
Chetes and gendarmes attack Armenians in the towns of Bayburt (Papert) and Terchan in Erzerum Province, and in Bitlis.
3/26/1915
Sahag, Catholicos of Cilicia, renews his instruction to the Armenians of Zeitun not to resist.
3/26/1915
Thirty more Armenian community leaders are arrested in Zeitun.
3/28/1915
The Armenian Dashnak leader, Murad, resists arrest in Sivas and flees to the mountains, and after many daring escapes reaches the Caucasus.
3/28/1915
Hamid, the governor-general of Diyarbekir Province, is removed for opposing the order of massacre, and is replaced by Dr. Reshid.
3/29/1915
In Aleppo, the capital of the province, Jemal Pasha falsely announces that the Armenians of Zeitun are in revolt and therefore he is instructing the military authorities, to the exclusion of the civilian government, to take measures to punish the Armenians.
3/29/1915
Artillery and three regiments of the regular army are sent to Zeitun as reinforcements for the three battalions which had arrived in the town in January and February.
3/30/1915
Mass beatings and tortures are inflicted on the Armenians of Chomaklu.
3/31/1915
In Marash, Turks announce a mass meeting to prepare a massacre. Acting under the terms of the March 29 order, the government forbids civilians to take matters into their own hands.
3/31/1915
Deportation of Armenians from Zeitun begins. Some of the inhabitants are sent to the Konia Desert in central Anatolia. The rest are sent to Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor) in the Syrian Desert.
3/31/1915
Azadamart, the leading Armenian newspaper in Constantinople is closed by an order of the government issued through the office of the Police Commissioner of Constantinople, Osman Bedri. 300 Turkish pounds in the petty cash box are stolen. The printing presses are removed to the Ittihad Press, where the organ Tanin was published by the CUP, with Huseyin Jahid (Yalchin) as editor-in-chief, and Ahmed Emin as associate editor.
4/1/1915
The mass arrest of Armenian political leaders is carried out in Sivas and other provinces.
4/2/1915
General robbery and arrests of Armenians are reported throughout Bitlis and Erzerum Provinces.
4/2/1915
In Sivas Province, battalions of gendarmery and 4000 chetes begin regular attacks on Armenian villages with increasing brutality.
4/3/1915
(Easter week) Mass arrests and a search for weapons are carried out in Marash and Hadjin (Hajen), with the seizure of all arms, including household knives. Numerous rapes during the house searches are reported.
4/5/1915
In Marash Turks demand 5,000 jackasses from the Armenians in an excuse to loot.
4/8/1915
Turkish emigrants from Bosnia are settled by the government in the villages of Zeitun District. 8,000 Turkish regulars are reported in Zeitun.
4/8/1915
The famous monastery of Zeitun is burned by the Turks.
4/9/1915
Turks declare a meeting in Marash to deport the Armenians. The Turkish government forbids civilian action on the ground that the March 16 Army command covered the situation.
4/11/1915
Talaat tells the Armenian parliamentary deputy Bedros Halajian that there will be no massacres.
4/12/1915
Widespread attacks on, and looting of, Armenian villages in Bitlis and Erzerum Provinces are fed by the accusation that the Armenians caused the war.
4/13/1915
(toward the end of the month) The Turkish government forbids American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to send coded messages to the American consuls and deprives him of his diplomatic prerogative of receiving communications uncensored.
4/14/1915
The governor-general of Van, Tahir Jevdet invites the Armenian parliamentary deputies from Van and the Dashnak leader Ishkhan to attend a conference.
4/15/1915
Armenian refugees from villages surrounding the city of Van arrive and notify the inhabitants that 80 villages in Van Province were already obliterated and that 24,000 Armenians had been killed in three days.
4/16/1915
The Armenian leaders Vramian and Ishkhan are slain during the night in the Kurdish village of Hirj by chetes on orders from Governor-general Tahir Jevdet.
4/17/1915
Friendly Kurds inform the inhabitants of Van of the assassination of Vramian and Ishkhan.
4/17/1915
The Armenians organize defense against the sudden attack by Turkish forces on the city of Van. (They hold out until advance units of the Russian Army consisting of Armenian volunteers arrive to their rescue on May 23, 1915).
4/18/1915
Until the end of April 32,000 more Armenians are slain in the villages of Van Province, including the inhabitants of remote villages.
4/18/1915
In Erzerum, Turkish civilians declare intentions to hold a meeting. The Army forbid it. Similar gatherings in other centers are also forbidden on the grounds that the Army is the agency responsible for handling the Armenians.
4/18/1915
The Governor-general of Van Province demands that the Armenians of the city of Van surrender their weapons. The Armenians refuse as chete units were harassing the surrounding villages.
4/19/1915
House searches are made in Diyarbekir and widespread persecution takes place.
4/20/1915
The deportation of the 25,000 Armenians of Zeitun is completed.
4/20/1915
The first large-scale arrests of Armenians are made in Diyarbekir upon the orders of Governor-general Reshid.
4/20/1915
Twenty Armenian Social Democratic Hnchak Party members are brought to the Central Prison in Constantinople to face court martial. They are hanged publicly on June 2, 1915.
4/24/1915
250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders are arrested in Constantinople and sent to Chankri and Ayash, where they are later slain.
4/24/1915
The editors and staff of Azadamart, the leading Armenian newspaper of Constantinople, are arrested, and on June 15 are slain in Diyarbekir, where they had been transported and imprisoned.
4/24/1915
The Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople and Zohrab, Armenian deputy in the Ottoman Parliament, petition the Grand Vizier, Said Halim, the Minister of the Interior Talaat, and the President of the Senate, Rifat, on behalf of the arrested Armenians of Constantinople. Though approached separately, all three give identical answers; that the government is isolating the Armenian leadership and dissolving the Armenian political organizations.
4/26/1915
Three Armenians are hanged publicly in Mush without trial.
4/27/1915
A second meeting in Erzerum to organize a communal massacre is disbanded by the government as interference in the affairs of the Army.
4/27/1915
26 Armenian leaders are arrested in Marsovan (Merzifon). A two-week-long search for weapons is started accompanied by acts of violence and the abuse of women.
4/29/1915
Russian citizens of Armenian origin are arrested in Constantinople.
4/29/1915
The disarming of the Armenians of Constantinople is carried out with many outrages.
4/30/1915
The vice-governor of Erzinjan begins the persecution of the Armenians with the arrest of many intellectuals.
5/1/1915
The arrest of the Armenian professors and teachers of the American Euphrates College in Kharput is started.
5/2/1915
Halil Pasha's forces are defeated by the Russian Army in the Caucasus and in northern Iran, and retreat to Van, Bitlis, and Mush, where they participate in the massacre of the Armenians.
5/2/1915
3,000 English and French civilians are arrested in Constantinople.
5/3/1915
House searches are made in Aleppo.
5/3/1915
Macedonian Turkish immigrants are installed in Zeitun by the government.
5/3/1915
The deportations from the villages of Erzerum Province are started.
5/4/1915
The mass arrests of Armenian leaders in Aintab are begun.
5/4/1915
200 Armenian leaders in Erzerum are arrested.
5/5/1915
Arrests and persecutions begin in Kharput.
5/6/1915
Allied nationals in Beirut (Beyrut) are deported to Damascus and dispersed from there.
5/6/1915
The New York Times reports that the Young Turks had adopted a policy to annihilate the Armenians.
5/9/1915
Lord Grey, British Minister of Foreign Affairs, sends a message to Enver holding him personally responsible should anything happen to the 3,000 captive English and French civilians.
5/10/1915
950 prominent Armenians are arrested in Diyarbekir on orders from Dr. Reshid, the governor-general of Diyarbekir Province.
5/10/1915
The Armenian refugees from Zeitun found in Marash, who had previously been spared deportation, are removed to the Syrian Desert.
5/12/1915
Vartkes, an Armenian deputy in the Ottoman Parliament, visits Talaat to protest the arrests of April 24.
5/14/1915
English and French civilian prisoners are deported to the interior of Anatolia.
5/14/1915
38 Armenian community leaders are arrested in the town of Chomaklu in Kayseri Province and shortly thereafter executed.
5/15/1915
The Armenian community leaders in the town of Bayburt are arrested and subsequently killed in Urbajioghli-Dere.
5/15/1915
Armenians are deported from the northern villages of Erzerum Province.
5/18/1915
Courts martial are set up in Marash to try the Armenian leaders arrested there shortly earlier.
5/19/1915
Advance troops of the Russian Army in the Caucasus led by Armenian volunteers reach Van and lift the siege of city.
5/19/1915
Armenians in the Khnus region of Erzerum Province are massacred.
5/21/1915
Regular Russian Army forces arrive in Van. They begin the cremation of the dead in the city and in the villages of the province. 55,000 dead are identified as Armenians.
5/21/1915
Armenian parliamentary deputy Vartkes visits Police Commissioner Osman Bedri to protest the arrests of the Constantinople Armenian community leaders.
5/22/1915
Turkish refugees are settled in the emptied Armenian villages of the Tortum District of Erzerum Province.
5/24/1915
A note is sent by the Allied Powers to the Turkish Cabinet holding it responsible for the massacres of the Armenians.
5/25/1915
Armenian parliamentary deputies Zohrab and Vartkes are arrested in Constantinople and later murdered while in custody in Kara-Kopru.
5/27/1915
German Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders reports that the deportations were planned by the Committee of Union and Progress, and received the approval of all the ministries, and that the execution of the plans was placed in the hands of the governors-general, their subordinates, and the police.
5/27/1915
The promulgation of the Temporary Law of Deportation, months after the depopulation of the Armenian settlements had been initiated.
5/27/1915
2,000 Armenians are deported from Marash.
5/27/1915
300 Armenians arrested on May 10 in Diyarbekir are murdered while in custody.
5/29/1915
Talaat is reported to have said that he was going to give to the Armenians a new and final residence.
5/29/1915
630 Armenians arrested on May 10 in Diyarbekir are murdered in the village of Bisheri while in custody and their bodies are thrown in the Tigris River.
5/31/1915
Two weeks of outrages perpetrated against the Armenians of the town of Chomaklu under the guise of forcing the Armenians to give up their arms are ended.
5/31/1915
German Ambassador Hans von Wangenheim advises against German interference in the deportations.
6/3/1915
Ayub Bey, an arch-assassin, leaves Adana for Aleppo in connection with the organizing of massacres.
6/4/1915
Enver issues a circular dispatch classified secret and urgent concerning the deportations.
6/7/1915
The first convoy of Armenian deportees leave Erzinjan toward Kemakh on their way to the Syrian Desert.
6/7/1915
The Armenian Prelate of Shabin-Karahisar, Vaghinag Vartabed, is assassinated.
6/7/1915
The Armenians of Constantinople appeal to the German and the Austrian Embassies to prevent the deportations and associated outrages, but receive no satisfactory reply.
6/7/1915
The Armenians arrested in Sivas on April 1 and transported to Angora Province are murdered in the woods of Meshedler-Yeri. The mass slaughter is witnessed by Greek woodcutters who report the news to the Armenians of Sivas.
6/8/1915
The second convoy of deportees from Erzinjan leaves for the Syrian Desert.
6/9/1915
The third convoy of Armenians departs from Erzinjan.
6/9/1915
Three Armenian medical officers, Dr. Hairanian, Dr. Baghdasar Vartanian, and Dr. Maksud, serving in the Turkish Army are murdered in the city of Sivas.
6/10/1915
Over a period of four days the Armenians deported from the towns and villages of Erzerum Province are slaughtered in a major massacre at Kemakh.
6/13/1915
The War Ministry orders the seizure of all the domestic animals of the Armenians.
6/13/1915
The War Ministry notifies that the permits given to Armenians exempting them from the deportations and safety certificates are only provisional and temporary.
6/13/1915
25,000 Armenians are murdered by the fourth day of the Kemakh massacre. The 86th Cavalry Brigade with its officers and the 2nd Reserve Cavalry Division of the Turkish Army participate in the slaughter.
6/13/1915
Instructions concerning procedures for the deportations and urging extreme strictness are sent to provincial governors.
6/14/1915
Subhi Bey, the assistant to the Undersecretary of the Interior Ministry asks for a list of Armenians working in the shipyards, docks, and arsenals of the Ministry of the Marine.
6/14/1915
The third convoy of Armenian deportees from the town of Bayburt departs.
6/14/1915
300 Armenian community leaders are arrested in Shabin-Karahisar.
6/15/1915
Twenty members of Armenian Social Democratic Hnchak Party are publicly hanged in Constantinople as a signal to the provinces to intensify measures.
6/15/1915
Twelve Armenian community leaders are publicly hanged in Sivas.
6/15/1915
The Armenians of Shabin-Karahisar organize defense against chete forces and the regular Turkish Army.
6/16/1915
3,500 Armenian men are seized in a mass arrest in Sivas Province.
6/17/1915
Talaat is reported to have declared that he will uproot the internal enemy.
6/17/1915
1,213 Armenian men are arrested in Marsovan (Merzifon).
6/17/1915
8,500 Armenians withdraw into the ruined castle of Shabin-Karahisar to defend themselves against the Turks.
6/18/1915
160 families are deported from city of Erzinjan.
6/19/1915
A second convoy composed of 300 families leaves the city of Erzerum.
6/21/1915
The governor-general of Aleppo, Jelal Bey, resigns in protest against the deportation order and the massacres.
6/21/1915
Talaat sends instructions to prevent the populace from robbing the abandoned goods of the Armenians.
6/23/1915
The Interior Ministry advises provincial governors that the Commission on Abandoned Goods will have charge of the resettlement of Turkish Muslim immigrants.
6/23/1915
The Interior Ministry advises taking the precaution of separating the convoys of Armenian deportees by a distance of five hours.
6/23/1915
The wholesale arrest of 1,500 men is carried out in Sivas Province.
6/23/1915
First large-scale massacre of Armenian men is carried out in the town of Kharput.
6/23/1915
Wholesale arrests are made in Bitlis of the scattered remnant Armenians who had escaped the previous series of massacres.
6/23/1915
Massacres of Armenian Christians, Maronites, Nestorians, Europeans, Catholics, and other non-Muslim people in the city of Mardin are carried out under the direct order of Dr. Reshid, the governor-general of Diyarbekir Province.
6/23/1915
The Armenian notables of Trebizond are sent by boat toward Samsun, and on the way are thrown, tightly bound together, into the Black Sea.
6/25/1915
The massacre of Armenians of Bitlis is carried out under the direct orders of Mustafa Abdulhalik Renda.
6/25/1915
A government decree instructs the 30,000 Armenians in Trebizond to leave the city within 5 days.
6/26/1915
An decree issued in Erzerum orders all Armenians to leave for Syria.
6/26/1915
A decree issued in Samsun orders all Armenians to leave within 15 days.
6/26/1915
The remaining Armenian men in Sivas are arrested.
6/28/1915
The previously arrested Armenian educators and community leaders in Kharput are transported from prison to be murdered.
6/29/1915
Vartkes and Zohrab, two Armenian deputies in the Ottoman Parliament, deported from Constantinople, arrive in custody in Aleppo.
6/30/1915
3,000 Armenians from the city of Erzerum are murdered while being deported.
6/30/1915
6,000 Armenians from Zeitun arrive in the Konia Desert and nearby malarial marshes.
7/1/1915
2,000 Armenian soldiers in the Turkish Army used as laborers are massacred near the city of Kharput.
7/1/1915
The first convoy of deportees leaves the seaport of Trebizond for the south.
7/1/1915
The governor-general of Sivas announces that the first convoy of deportees from the city are to leave by July 5 in groups according to street residence. A total of 48,000 persons are deported. The governor, commissioner of police, two parliamentary deputies, the qadi (the chief religious judge), and the mufti (the religious chief) tell the Armenians that they were being resettled for the duration of the war in order to forestall any resistance.
7/2/1915
Bands of 4,000 chetes operating out of the mountains around Erzinjan begin daily raids against the southward bound convoys of Armenian deportees.
7/2/1915
The deportation decree is issued in the city of Mush.
7/4/1915
For the record an official German protest is registered with the Grand Vizier. The protest is left unanswered by the Turkish government.
7/4/1915
Neshed Pasha leaves Sivas with three regiments and artillery to subdue the Armenians resisting in Shabin-Karahisar.
7/5/1915
In Diyarbekir 2,000 Armenian soldiers working in labor corps are killed.
7/5/1915
The first convoy of deportees leaves the city of Sivas. Every day for 16 days an average of 400 families leave, the overwhelming majority being slain on route to the Syrian Desert. The last convoy departs from the city on July 20.
7/6/1915
By this date up to 1,000 Armenian families had left Trebizond in convoys headed south.
7/7/1915
The male members of 800 Armenian families in the town of Kharput are killed.
7/8/1915
Zaven, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, appeals to the Minister of Justice, Ibrahim Bey, who replies that he cannot intervene in matters concerning the War Ministry.
7/10/1915
2,700 persons are killed in a second massacre in Mardin.
7/11/1915
The beginning of a four-day massacre in Mush under the combined orders of parliamentary deputy Elias, vice-governor Servet, and Governor-general Mustafa Abdulhalik Renda, Talaat's brother-in-law.
7/11/1915
The Interior Ministry instructs that the Armenian villages be settled with Muslim immigrants.
7/12/1915
The government advises all governors-general that Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor) District is saturated and that the rest of the deportees be routed to Kirkuk District in northern Iraq, to the south of Aleppo, and to the east of Syria.
7/12/1915
Instructions are issued to distribute Armenian orphans to Turkish homes.
7/13/1915
The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins. During the whole month the greatest concentration and universalization of massacring and murdering occurs in every province of Turkey.
7/13/1915
The last convoy, containing all the remaining Armenians in the city, leaves Kharput.
7/13/1915
Zaven, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, is declined an audience with Talaat.
7/14/1915
Jemal, Commander of Aleppo's Fourth Army Corps, protests to Dr. Reshid, the governor-general of Diyarbekir Province about the dumping of dead bodies in the Euphrates River and advises burial. From June 22 to July 17, a period of 25 days, a steady stream of bodies of massacred Armenians floats down the Euphrates River.
7/16/1915
Bodies from Kharput Province and Erzerum Province float down the Euphrates to Jerablus, where they are seen and identified by German officers.
7/18/1915
In the region of Dersim, 3,000 Armenians are killed by the Turks. Almost all of the large Kurdish population of Dersim refuses to participate in the massacres and even shelters many Armenians.
7/21/1915
First day of the Turkish attack on Musa Dagh (Musa Ler in Armenian).
7/23/1915
The Italian consul at Trebizond reports about the barbarities he had witnessed.
7/23/1915
The seventh anniversary of the 1908 restoration of the liberal Constitution of 1876 is celebrated.
7/24/1915
Talaat sends instructions to Urfa, Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor), and Diyarbekir to bury the bodies of those fallen by the roadside and not throw them in ditches, lakes, or rivers.
7/24/1915
The registration and classification of all prisoners from Sivas is carried out. This was done in accordance with a directive in general circulation.
7/25/1915
Behaeddin Shakir, chief of the Special Organization in Erzerum Province, telegrams Nazim Bey Resneli via Sabit Bey, the governor-general of Kharput Province, inquiring whether the Armenians deported from there are being exterminated or just being convoyed.
7/25/1915
Behaeddin Shakir instructs the governor-general of Kastamonu Province to begin the deportation of the Armenians there.
7/26/1915
Talaat informs the Ittihad party organization in Malatia explaining that half of the loot captured from the Armenians is being assigned to the Central Committee of Ittihad in Constantinople, and the other half is to be distributed to chetes. (On December 12, 1918, the Turkish newspaper, Sabah, reported that each chete in the Malatia area received as a result 15,000 Turkish pounds.)
7/27/1915
Governor-general Reshid Pasha reports to the Interior Ministry that the deportation of the Armenians from Kastamonu Province is completed.
7/27/1915
Behaeddin Shakir sends a cipher telegram to the governor-general of Adalia Province, Sabur Sami Bey, asking him what steps he was taking at a time, when in Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Sivas, and Trebizond Provinces, not a single Armenian remains because they have all been sent in the direction of Mosul and Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor). Sabur sends a copy of the telegram to Talaat to show that he had received these indirect instructions.
7/27/1915
The vice-governor of Yozgat District, in Angora Province, reports to the Interior Ministry that 68,000 Armenians had been slain in the district.
7/28/1915
Sabit, the governor-general of Kharput Province, informs the Interior Ministry that all the road are filled with the bodies of women and children and time cannot be found to bury them.
7/28/1915
The governor-general of Erzerum Province reports of widespread looting and rape.
7/28/1915
The Interior Ministry issues a circular telegram instructing that the Muslim population be settled in the large Armenian villages.
7/28/1915
The deportation of the Armenians of the town of Aintab begins.
7/28/1915
The deportation of the Armenians of the town of Kilis begins.
7/28/1915
The deportation of the Armenians of the town of Adiaman begins.
7/28/1915
Professor Kakig Ozanian of the American College and others from Marsovan (Merzifon), together with the Armenian community leader Dikran Diranian and others from Samsun, are transported to the prisons of Sivas to be killed.
7/30/1915
A mass arrest of Armenians in the city of Angora is carried out. Those arrested are slain the next day at a place six hours distance from the city of Angora.
7/30/1915
The withdrawal of the Russian Army from the city of Van begins.
7/31/1915
The mass murder of Armenian community leaders of Constantinople imprisoned in Ayash and Chankri is carried. They are killed along with the Armenians of Angora arrested the day before.
8/1/1915
The deportation of 25,000 Armenians from Adabazar, near Constantinople, begins.
8/1/1915
20,000 deportees arrive in Aleppo.
8/1/1915
Mass torture inflicted on 500 Armenians in the prisons of Adabazar.
8/2/1915
Ambassador Henry Morgenthau reports that on this day Talaat told him that the Ittihad Committee had carefully considered in all its details the matter of crushing the Armenians, and that the policy which was being pursued was that which had been officially adopted. He also told Morgenthau that the deportations were not the result of hasty decisions but of careful and prolonged deliberation. Talaat, moreover, indicated that three quarters of the Armenians had already been disposed of, and none were left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzerum.
8/2/1915
For six nights, Armenian prisoners, mostly intellectuals, held in Gok-Medrese in Sivas, which was a Seljuk structure in use as a temporary prison, were taken out and slain.
8/3/1915
150,000 deportees arrive in Aleppo from various unspecified places.
8/3/1915
4,500 Armenian deportees from Seghert and 2,000 deportees from Mezre arrive near Aleppo.
8/3/1915
15,000 Armenians arrive in Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor).
8/3/1915
In response to unofficial German protests about large-scale murders, rapes, and tortures inflicted on the Armenian deportees on the highways, which was creating a bad impression on the Americans, a circular telegram is sent advising against attacking and raping Armenians on the highways.
8/3/1915
Officials are instructed not to appropriate the 'abandoned goods' of the Armenians for personal use.
8/3/1915
60,000 Armenian deportees from unspecified places arrive near Aleppo.
8/4/1915
Talaat sends a circular telegram to all governors and officials expecting accountability for the 'abandoned goods.'
8/6/1915
Eighteen Armenians are publicly hanged in the town of Everek near Kayseri.
8/7/1915
The Armenians of Mersin (Mersine) are deported.
8/7/1915
The listing of all real estate seized from the Armenians is requested by the Interior Ministry.
8/10/1915
All the Armenians of Chorum are deported via Boghazli and Bozanti with the Syrian Desert their purportedly ultimate destination.
8/10/1915
A circular telegram calls for the registration of all Muslim creditors of the Armenians.
8/11/1915
Instructions are issued that Turkish settlers be sent via Angora, Sivas, and Kayseri to Kharput and others via Konia (Konya) and Adana to Diyarbekir.
8/11/1915
Armenian women married to Turks are deprived of the right of inheritance.
8/11/1915
The last of 84 Armenian intellectuals, who were brought to the Ayash prison and who over the course of the weeks had been taken out in small groups to be murdered at various times, was killed. The longest-held was in prison in Ayash for 105 days.
8/11/1915
The Armenian intellectuals imprisoned in the Sifahdiye Medrese (a Muslim religious school) in Sivas, are taken out from the city and slain. There were 36 extermination centers in the area of Sivas. 5,000 Armenian intellectuals imprisoned in the Gok Medrese and the Sifahdiye Medrese, both Seljuk structures in use as temporary prisons, were taken to these 36 execution centers and slain.
8/12/1915
The end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. First day of the three day holiday of Bairam. No massacres were carried during these three days as it was time off for rest.
8/12/1915
Enver reports that to date 200,000 Armenians had been slain.
8/12/1915
In Aleppo Province 200,000 Armenian deportees are reported in transit to the desert.
8/12/1915
Boghos Nubar, a leading Armenian from Egypt, who had never been in Turkey, but who had been instrumental in Paris in pressing Turkey to introduce reforms in the Armenian provinces, was tried in absentia by a Turkish court martial and sentenced to death for treason.
8/13/1915
The deportation of the Armenians of Izmid (Izmit), Baghchejik (Bardizag), Bursa, and Adabazar begins.
8/13/1915
Instructions are issued to avoid deportees from coming to rest near military installations.
8/13/1915
From the Central Prison of city of Sivas where many Armenian intellectuals, political leaders, and the leading men of the villages surrounding Sivas were imprisoned, 15,000 Armenians were taken out and slain in the 36 extermination centers of the region.
8/13/1915
Instructions are sent out to the committees liquidating the 'abandoned goods' of the Armenians and directions given about methods for depositing the moneys obtained.
8/14/1915
Saturday, the third and last day of Bairam.
8/16/1915
50,000 deportees are observed on the road from Bozanti to Aleppo.
8/18/1915
The New York Times reports of a plan for the destruction of the whole Armenian nation.
8/19/1915
250 Armenians are killed in the city of Urfa in a massacre by Turks inaugurating the first attempt to uproot the Armenians of Urfa. The Armenians of Urfa begin the defense of their city
8/19/1915
Lord Bryce reports that 500,000 Armenians had been murdered in Turkey.
8/21/1915
The War Ministry requisitions for the military forty-one kinds of articles of merchandise from the Armenians.
8/21/1915
A general order is issued for the liquidation of the closed commercial stores of the Armenians.
8/23/1915
A second massacre of Armenians in Urfa is organized.
8/25/1915
The War Ministry requisitions all soap found in the homes and stores of the deported Armenians.
8/26/1915
The War Ministry requisitions for its military supply depots all wood, coal, and copper found in the homes and stores of deported Armenians.
8/26/1915
The Armenian poet, Daniel Varoujan, together with the poet physician Rupen Sevak, and others, are murdered by chetes while incarcerated in the Ayash prison.
8/26/1915
60,000 deported Armenians in the Aleppo area are ordered to leave for Hawran, an Arab district in northern Trans-Jordan.
8/26/1915
The Armenian Catholics in Angora are arrested.
8/28/1915
Instructions are issued forbidding the purchase of property from Armenian deportees.
8/28/1915
The students of the Sanasarian Academy in the city of Sivas are murdered in the town of Gemerak some thirty miles southwest of Sivas.
8/31/1915
Talaat tells the German ambassador, Prince Ernst Hohenlohe-Langenburg, that the Armenian Question no longer exists. Hohenlohe had assumed the German ambassadorship on July 20.
9/2/1915
4,750 Armenians are murdered in Jezire.
9/3/1915
10,000 survivors from the Armenians deported from Bursa and Izmid (Izmit) arrive in Konia (Konya).
9/3/1915
The New York Times reports that Izmid (Izmit) had been put to the torch and the Armenians massacred.
9/3/1915
15,000 Armenian deportees are reported at Eskishehir, 5,000 at Alayund, and 2,000 at Chai.
9/6/1915
In Marsovan (Merzifon), of the 62 Armenian girls who had been saved by American missionaries, on this date only 21 remained. 21 others had been abducted by Turks.
9/6/1915
The Interior Ministry orders all Armenian schools to be placed at the disposal of Turkish authorities.
9/7/1915
Massacres of Armenians are carried out in Yozgat District.
9/7/1915
The War Ministry instructs that the goods requisitioned from the Armenians are to be distributed to the Third, Fourth, and Iraq Armies.
9/7/1915
The second Liquidation Commission in Kayseri is organized.
9/8/1915
5,000 Armenian deportees are reported at Bozanti.
9/10/1915
On the fifty-third day of the Armenian defense in Musa Dagh, 4,058 persons are rescued by three English and one French warship, which transport the survivors to Port Said in Egypt.
9/11/1915
6,000 Armenian deportees in transit left Adana in the direction of Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor).
9/12/1915
A Fifth Army notice advises that the Islamization of Armenian soldiers is the responsibility of the civilian authorities.
9/13/1915
The Turkish Red Crescent Society asks that all cotton goods, and other necessities be granted to the organization from the 'abandoned goods' of the Armenian deportees.
9/14/1915
The New York Times reports the murder of 350,000 Armenians.
9/14/1915
The survivors of Musa Dagh arrive in Port Said.
9/15/1915
In a circular letter Talaat explains that the real intention of sending the Armenians to the Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor) Desert is to annihilate them.
9/16/1915
Talaat sends instructions by circular telegram to mete out the same fate to the Armenian women and children that had been dealt to the Armenian men.
9/16/1915
A circular dispatch is issued advising caution against the looting of the property of foreigners, with special mention of Singer Sewing Machine Company property.
9/16/1915
Talaat send a telegram to Ali Suad Bey, Governor of Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor), explaining his responsibilities.
9/17/1915
A circular telegram instructs all district attorneys to sign and seal the account books cataloguing the properties seized from the Armenians.
9/18/1915
In Aleppo, Nuri and Ali Bey consult about the future massacre of the Armenian remnants in the Syrian Desert at Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor).
9/21/1915
A circular telegram authorizes the seizure of all Armenian schools and authorized their placement under the control of local education committees.
9/22/1915
Weekly reports on the number of Armenians dead is requested.
9/22/1915
The War Ministry requisitions for the use of the army all wood and coal in the homes and stores of Armenian deportees.
9/23/1915
300 Armenians are killed in a massacre at Urfa.
9/23/1915
11,000 Armenian deportees from 26 different villages are observed at Afiyon-Karahisar.
9/24/1915
The vice-governor of Bolu, Mufid, wires the Interior Ministry that the Armenians of Bolu are about to be deported.
9/24/1915
The local Ittihad Secretary informs the Interior Ministry that 61,000 Armenians had been deported up to this date from Chankri and Angora. He also reports that the Muslims of Angora Province worship the Ittihad party and government for its committed deeds and that the same can be secured in Bolu if the same measures are taken there.
9/25/1915
The Sanitation Division of the War Ministry requisitions all the medical implements and pharmaceuticals held by Armenians.
9/25/1915
24 Armenian schools in Kayseri alone are requisitioned in four days.
9/26/1915
A Law on Abandoned Goods is ratified by the Ottoman Senate legalizing ex post facto the looting by the government of the properties of the Armenians.
9/27/1915
The Interior Ministry by circular telegram orders the deportation of all Armenian women, children, and the sick.
9/28/1915
The German ambassador in the United States, Johann Heinrich Count von Bernstorff, suggests that the stories about massacres in Turkey are fabricated.
9/28/1915
A circular telegram advises that all Armenian property now belongs to the Turkish government.
9/28/1915
The governor-general of Diyarbekir Province, Dr. Reshid, reports to the Interior Ministry that more than 120,000 Armenians have been deported from Diyarbekir Province.
9/29/1915
By this date 10,000 Armenian deportees had arrived at Afiyon-Karahisar, 50,000 had arrived at Konia (Konya), 10,000 had arrived at Intille (Intili), while 150,000 were reported at Katma.
9/30/1915
The deportees from Yalova, Angora, and Kastomuni (Kastamoni) are numbered at 250,000.
10/1/1915
U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing delivers a note to German Ambassador Bernstorff relating to the massacres of the Armenians.
10/1/1915
The governor-general of Sivas Province, Ahmed Muammer, travels to Amasia and elsewhere to inspect the completion and effect of the massacres in preparation for Talaat's inspection trip.
10/1/1915
600 Armenian orphan boys are Turkified in Herek.
10/2/1915
(General Vehib Pasha reported during the postwar court martial that in September 1915, Behaeddin Shakir assembled and used murdering cutthroats in the Third Army Zone [the six eastern or Armenian provinces of Turkey].)
10/4/1915
The Interior Ministry advises against the need of opening orphanages and prolonging the life of Armenian children.
10/7/1915
By this date the number of deported Armenians still living is estimated at 360,000 minimum, and the number of Armenians dead is estimated at 800,000 minimum.
10/7/1915
$75,000 is collected in the United States for relief for the Armenian deportees.
10/7/1915
In the British House of Lords a general discussion of the Armenian situation takes place. Lord Bryce, Lord Crewe, and Lord Cromer condemn the Turkish barbarities.
10/8/1915
Talaat requests from provincial officials documents proving Armenian 'treason' against Turkey to justify the massacres.
10/10/1915
45 Armenians are arrested in Adrianople (Edirne), and 1,600 Armenians are deported.
10/12/1915
Orders are issued forbidding marriage with Armenian women.
10/13/1915
In Berlin an announcement is made that the story of the Armenian massacres is an Allied fabrication.
10/15/1915
The dean of the Realschule (the German technical school) in Aleppo and German professors there protest against the massacres of the Armenians to the German Foreign Office.
10/15/1915
16,000 Armenian deportees are observed at Afiyon-Karahisar and 80,000 at Konia (Konya).
10/15/1915
6,000 Turkish soldiers stage the final attack on the Armenians defending themselves in Urfa. 400 Turkish troops are killed as Armenians defend to the last.
10/16/1915
Immunity from prosecution is guaranteed to those carrying out the massacres of the Armenians in Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor).
10/16/1915
16,000 Armenian deportees from Bursa and Izmid (Izmit) leave Afiyon-Karahisar for Konia (Konya).
10/16/1915
Lord Bryce remarks that Germany could stop the massacres if it wished to do so.
10/16/1915
20,000 Armenian deportees in transit are murdered in the city and environs of Urfa.
10/18/1915
The governor-general of Sivas Province, Ahmed Muammer Bey, inspects the carrying out of his orders for the deportation and destruction of the Armenians in the province, in anticipation of Talaat's inspection trip which occurs shortly thereafter.
10/18/1915
A large public gathering to protest the massacres of the Armenians by the Turkish government is held in the Century Theater in New York. Rabbi Wise, B. Cochrane, Dr. Barton, and H. Holt are the main speakers.
10/18/1915
Mufti Zade Zia, a Turkish propagandist, writing in New York describes the Armenians as traitors.
10/22/1915
The Turkish Embassy in Washington accuses the Armenians of treason against the Ottoman state.
10/25/1915
Halil Bey of Menteshe, the Vice-President of the Turkish Chamber of Deputies and president of the State Council, becomes Minister of Foreign Affairs.
10/25/1915
Instructions are issued requesting that within one week documents be sent to the Interior Ministry indicting the Armenian people as traitors.
10/27/1915
20,000 Armenian deportees are reported in Konia (Konya) on this date.
10/28/1915
Numerous Armenian families are deported from Adrianople (Edirne) at midnight without prior notice upon the order of Acting Governor-general Zekerie.
10/28/1915
Per earlier instructions sent by Talaat, 80,000 Armenian deportees left the Konia (Konya) station for Bozanti on this date on their way to their 'final destination.' These 80,000 were deportees from cities near Constantinople and from the Armenian communities in the western parts of Turkey.
10/31/1915
Instructions are issued advising that the special measures taken against the Armenians be conducted in places beyond the view of foreigners and especially the American consuls.
10/31/1915
Instructions are issued for the trial by court martial of any Armenian reporting the events of the deportations to any foreigner.
11/3/1915
Doctor Schacht, a German army physician, stationed near the village of Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor) village, reports counting 7,000 severed Armenian heads (skulls) in Sabgha District near the Euphrates River.
11/4/1915
The German consul in Mosul reports that Halil Pasha's soldiers had massacred the Armenians north of Mosul and were preparing to massacre the Armenians in the city of Mosul.
11/5/1915
On this date, 10,000 Armenian deportees are reported in Bozanti, 20,000 deportees in Tarsus, 40,000 deportees in Islahiye, and 50,000 deportees in Katma.
11/5/1915
150,000 Armenian deportees are reported scattered between Adana and Aleppo crossing the Amanos Range.
11/5/1915
20,000 Armenian deportees are reported in Adana.
11/8/1915
The Turkish authorities again make preparations to deport the 200,000 Armenians of Constantinople.
11/11/1915
Jemal Pasha, as commander of Syria, seeks to court martial the dean of the Realschule in Aleppo and other German signatories of the protest of October 15 for publicizing the Armenian events in Cilicia.
11/13/1915
20,000 Armenian deportees are reported in the Hawran District of Trans-Jordan. (On November 15, 1918, only 450 of this group of 20,000 were reported alive.)
11/13/1915
On this date, 10,000 Armenian deportees were reported in Intille (Intili) and 150,000 deportees were reported in Katma living under terrible conditions, disease-wracked and starving.
11/14/1915
The Anglican and the Orthodox Churches ask U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to pressure the German government to intervene with the Turkish government to stop the massacre of the Armenians.
11/15/1915
The German Charge d'affaires Baron Konstantin von Neurath, welcomes the new ambassador, Paul Count von Wolff-Metternich, who represented Imperial Germany from this date until October 3, 1916. The Charge d'affaires had been in charge of the German diplomatic representation in Turkey since October 2, 1915, when Hohenlohe had departed.
11/16/1915
The fields in Bakche District were reported littered with the corpses of many thousands of Armenians who had starved to death while being deported through here.
11/17/1915
Sir Robert Cecil protests the Turkish charge that the massacres were a response to an Armenian revolt, and charges that they were the result of a premeditated plan on the part of the Turkish government.
11/18/1915
A circular telegram is sent ordering the deportation of Armenian children.
11/18/1915
Talaat leaves Constantinople for an inspection tour of Anatolia. He returns on December 18.
11/25/1915
Up to this date, 500,000 Armenian deportees are estimated to have passed through Bozanti (northwest of Adana).
11/26/1915
1,010 Armenians are deported from the village of Mamure (Mamura) in Adana District.
12/1/1915
The fields around the village of Mamure (Mamura) are reported littered with several thousand corpses of starved or murdered deportees who had been traveling through.
12/4/1915
10,000 Armenian bachelors are deported from the city of Constantinople up to this date. A list is prepared of 70,000 Armenian individuals to be deported from Constantinople.
12/6/1915
A circular telegram instructs that no Armenian is to be left alive in the eastern provinces.
12/7/1915
The German ambassador Wolff-Metternich goes to the Sublime Porte in connection with the massacres and is told that nothing could be discussed until Talaat's return.
12/9/1915
Orders are issued in Aleppo Province for the deportation of 400 Armenian orphans previously placed in an orphanage.
12/12/1915
180,000 Armenian refugees from Turkey who had reached Tiflis (Tbilisi) are reported to be in dire conditions.
12/14/1915
Orders are issued for the killing of Armenian priests.
12/15/1915
A circular telegram clarifies that the purpose of the deportations is annihilation.
12/16/1915
Instructions are issued advising against slowing the deportations and urging the dispatch of the deportees to the desert.
12/18/1915
Talaat returns from Anatolia. German Ambassador Wolff-Metternich is told by Talaat that the Turks are not killing innocents.
12/22/1915
Orders are issued forbidding the acceptance from any Armenian of an application of exemption from the deportations.
12/25/1915
Orders are issued for the deportation of all children except those who did not remember their parents.
12/29/1915
On this date, of the estimated 210,000 refugees who had reached the Caucasus, only 173,000 are reported still living, almost 40,000 having died as a result of privations and disease. Of the remaining 173,000, 105,000 were from Van Province, 48,000 from Bayazid (Bayazit) District, 20,038 from Mush District.
12/30/1915
A circular telegram, as a follow-up on the telegram of December 15, instructs that Armenians desiring to convert to Islam are to be notified that their Islamization must take place after they reach their final destination. In view of the earlier instructions clarifying the purpose of the deportations as annihilation, the new instructions imply that Armenians are no longer to be allowed to escape destruction for any reason.

Nothing Personal: Turkey's Top Ten Challenges

2009-04-20T14:01:00.001-04:00

by Raffi K. Hovannisian

www. foreignpolicyjournal. com/2009/04/19/nothing-personal-turkeys-top-ten-challenges/

April 19, 2009

YEREVAN, Armenia - That an Armenian repatriate, American-born into a
legacy of remembrance inherited from a line of survivors of genocide
nearly a century ago, feels compelled to entitle his thoughts with
a focus on Turkey - and not Armenia - reveals a larger problem,
a gaping wound, and an imperative for closure long overdue on both
sides of history's tragic divide.

The new Armenia, independent of its longstanding statelessness
since 1991, is my everyday life, as are the yearnings of my fellow
citizens for their daily dignity, true democracy, the rule of law,
and an empowering end to sham elections and the corruption, arrogance
and unaccountability of power.

"Generation next" is neither victim nor subject, nor any longer an
infidel "millet." We seek not, in obsequious supplication, to curry
the favor of the world's strong and self-important, whose interests
often trump their own principles and whose geopolitics engulf the
professed values of liberty and justice for all. Gone are the residual
resources for kissing up or behind.

And so, with a clarity of conscience and a goodness of heart, I expect
Turkey and its administration to address the multiple modern challenges
they face and offer to this end a list of realities, not commandments,
that will help enable a new era of regional understanding and the
globalization of a peaceful order that countenances neither victims
nor victimizers.

1. Measure sevenfold, cut once: This old local adage suggests a
neat lesson for contemporary officials. Before launching, at Davos
or elsewhere, pedantic missiles in condemnation of the excesses of
others, think fully about the substance and implications of your
invectives. This is not a narrow Armenian assertion; it includes all
relevant dimensions, including all minorities. Occupation, for its
part, is the last word Turkish representatives should be showering
in different directions at different international fora, lest someone
require a textbook definition of duplicity.

Maintain dignity but tread lightly, for history is a powerful and
lasting precedent.

2. Self-reflection: Democracies achieve domestic success, applicants
accomplish European integration, and countries become regional drivers
only when they have the political courage and moral fortitude to
undergo this process. Face yourself, your own conduct, and the track
record of state on behalf of which you speak. Not only the success
stories and points of pride, but the whole deal. Be honest and brave
about it; you do possess the potential to graduate from decades of
denialism. Recent trends in civil society, however tentative and
preliminary, attest to this.

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish
soldiers, 1915.

3. The Armenian genocide: Don't revise history; recognize the
historical record and take responsibility. There is a wealth of
evidentiary documentation, more than sufficient to disarm the various
instruments of official denial that have been employed over the
years. But this is only the paperwork. The most damning testimony is
not in the killing of more than a million human souls in a manifest
execution of the 20th century's first genocide or, in the words of
the American ambassador reporting at the time, "race extermination."

4. Homeland-killing: Worse than genocide, as incredible as that
sounds, is the premeditated deprivation of a people of its ancestral
heartland. And that's precisely what happened. In what amounted
to the Great Armenian Dispossession, a nation living for more
than four millennia upon its historic patrimony was in a matter
of months brutally, literally, and completely eradicated from its
land. Unprecedented in human history, this expropriation constitutes to
this day a murder, not only of a people, but of a civilization and an
attempt to erase a legacy of culture, a time-earned way of life. This
is where the debate about calling it genocide or not becomes absurd,
trivial, and tertiary. A homeland was exterminated by the Turkish
republic's predecessor and under the world9 9s watchful eye, and
we're negotiating a word. Even that term is not enough to encompass
the magnitude of the crime.

5. Coming clean: It is the only way to move forward. This is not a
threat, but a statement of plain, unoriginal fact. Don't be afraid
of the price tag. What the Armenians lost is priceless. Instead
of skirting this catastrophic legacy through counterarguments
or commissions, return to the real script and undertake your own
critical introspection and say what you plan to do to right the wrong,
to atone for and to educate, to revive and restore, and to celebrate
the Armenian heritage of what is today eastern Turkey. Finally take
the initiative for a real reconciliation based on the terrible truth
but bolstered by a fresh call to candor.

6. Never again: The rewards of coming to this reality check far
outweigh its perils. What is unfortunately unique about the Holocaust
is not the evil of the Shoah itself, but the demeanor of postwar
Germany to face history and itself, to assume responsibility for
the crimes of the preceding regime, to mourn and to dignify, to seek
forgiveness and make redemption, and to incorporate this ethic into
the public consciousness and the methodology of state. A veritable
leader of the new Turkey, the European one of the future, might do
the same, not in cession but in full expression of national pride and
honor. My grandmother, who survived the genocide owing to the human
heights of a blessed Turkish neighbor who sheltered little Khengeni
of Ordu from the fate of her family, did not live to see that day.

7. The politics of power: Turkey's allies can help it along this way.

Whether it's from the West or the East, the message for Turkey is that,
in the third millennium AD, the world will be governed by a different
set of rules: that might will respect right, that no crime against
humanity or its denial will be tolerated. The Obama Administration
bears the burden, but has the capacity for this leadership of
light. And it is now being tested.

8. Turkey and Armenia: These sovereign neighbors have never, in
all of history, entered into a single bilateral agreement with
each other. Whether diplomatic, economic, political, territorial,
or security-specific, no facet of their relationship, or the actual
absence thereof, is regulated by a contract freely and fairly entered
into between the two republics. It's about time. Hence, the process
of official contacts and reciprocal visits that unraveled in the
wake of a Turkey-Armenia soccer match in September 2008 should mind
this gap and structure the discourse not to disdain the divides
emanating from the past, but to bridge them through the immediate
establishment of diplomatic relations without the positing or posturing
of preconditions, the lifting of Turkey's unlawful border blockade,
and a comprehensive, negotiated resolution of all outstanding matters,
based on an acceptance of history and the commitment to a future
guaranteed against it recurrence.

9. Third-party interests: Nor should the fact of dialogue, as facially
laudable as it is, be exploited as an insincere justification to
deter third-parties, and particularly the U.S. Congress, from adopting
decisions or resolutions that simply seek to reaffirm the historical
record. Such comportment, far from the statesmanship expected,
contradicts the aim and spirit of rapprochement.

10. The past as present: The current Armenian state covers a mere
fraction of the vast expanse of the great historical plateau upon
which the Armenians lived until the surgical disgorgement of homeland
and humanity that was 1915. Accordingly, as improbable as it seems
in view of its ethnic kinship with Azerbaijan, modern-day Turkey also
carries the charge to discard outdated and pursue corrective policies
in the Caucasus. This high duty applies not only to a qualitatively
improved and cleansed rapport with the Republic of Armenia, but also
in respect of new regional realities.

On the road to inevitable self-discovery, Turkey, its future with
Armenia, and their immediate neighborhood have come to form one of the
planet's most sensitive and seismic tectonic plates. Integrity, equity,
and a bit of humility might help to sav e the day. And our world.

Raffi K. Hovannisian was Armenia's first minister of foreign affairs
and currently represents the opposition Heritage party in the National
Assembly.

TURKISH PROFESSOR: RECOGNITION OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IS THE ONLY WAY TO BRING JUSTICE TO OUR LIVES

2009-03-27T11:34:00.000-04:00

PanARMENIAN.Net
26.03.2009 19:44 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Suppressed truth poisons the suppressor, it also
poisons those who are deprived of the knowledge of the truth. Not
only that: suppressed truth poisons the entire environment in which
both the suppressor and those who are subjected to that suppression
live. So it poisons everything. Nearly a century after the genocide
of Armenians and Assyrians/Syriacs as well as other Christian peoples
of the Asia Minor, Turkey is still being poisoned by the suppression
of the truth. And because the suppressed truth concerns a crime,
because the suppressors are those in power, and those deprived of
the truth are the whole nation, it is the very future of that nation
which is also poisoned.

If you are a ruler suppressing a truth, you have to suppress those who
seek the truth as well. The poison feeds you with self-glorification
in order to evade guilt, hatred to justify your lying and cruelty
to sustain the lie at all costs. Bits of truth may be known to some
of the people you rule. So you either have to make them join your
self-deception by offering excuses for the crime you committed to
persuade them there was no other choice or declare them traitors and
carry on an endless war against those who resist persuasion.

But people tend to be persuaded; so in Turkey the great majority of
people sincerely believe that if it is a question of life or death for
the "fatherland" the state machinery may rightfully resort to unlawful
methods - in other words, that the so-called "national interests"
justify all means. This is how the suppressed truth and the methods
of that suppression poison minds generation after generation.

So, it is no surprise that for nearly a century Turkey saw no real
democracy, no real peace, no real well-being. Violence has always
been part of our lives. Military coups followed one another and
in the absence of an actual military rule, there has always been
sometimes overt, sometimes covert, threat of it. Since the foundation
of the Republic, the Kurdish uprisings and their violent repression
continued. In the last 30 years the land which was once the homeland
of Armenians and Assyrians as well, has been suffering from what the
authorities call the "fight against terrorism". Evacuated villages,
forced migration, people under custody going missing and unsolved
murders became the characteristics of the region.

The bloodshed has never stopped since 1915.

It's not only the violence. Permit me to borrow here what I had written
on the occasion of the 91st anniversary of the Genocide, which Khatchig
Mouradian quoted in his article published by Znet on April 23, 2006:

"A big curse fell upon this land [in 1915]. The settlements where once
artisans, manufacturers, and tradesmen produced and traded goods,
where theatres and schools disseminated knowledge and aesthetic
fulfillment, where churches and monasteries refined the souls, where
beautiful architecture embodied a great, ancient culture; in short,
a civilized, lively urban world was turned into a rural area of vast,
barren, silent, uninhabited land and settlements marked by buildings
without a history and without a personality."

Nowadays an excavation is going on in Silopi, to investigate the
allegations that in the 1990's the dead bodies of persons who went
missing under custody by security forces had been dumped there. So
far some bones, hair and pieces of clothing have been found - what was
left after the clean-up operations - and sent to forensic laboratory
for analysis.

This is one of the places which has suffered most from the suspension
of rule of law in the region for the sake of the so-called "unity
of Turkey".

And it is the same place where, 96 years ago, masses of mostly
Assyrians/Syriacs but Armenians as well, though in smaller number,
were either massacred outright or driven on foot to the mountains
where death was certain as a result of starvation, destitution and
exposure to harsh weather conditions without any shelter. This was
what happened in many places to Armenians throughout Asia Minor during
that reign of terror.

Now the "death wells" represents the continuation of the bloodshed
and suppressed truths. After 96 years there are still unburied dead
bodies to be searched for by means of excavations.

Yes, "All suppressed truths become poisonous," said Nietzsche many,
many years ago, but he continued: "- And let everything break up
- which can be broken up by our truths! Many a house is still to
be built!"

"This is the only way that would bring justice to our lives - I mean
recognition of the damage done and making amends," stated Professor
Ayse Gunaysu in his report at "Legacy of the 1915 Genocide in the
Ottoman Empire" conference in Stockholm held on Mar.23, 2009.

Armenian population numbers are a chilling reminder of genocide

2009-03-13T11:44:00.000-04:00

Fresno Bee Editorial
Armenian population numbers are a chilling reminder of genocide
Mar. 12, 2009
http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/story/1256048.html

A chilling bit of new evidence has emerged in the controversy over the
Armenian genocide, and it comes from an unlikely source: the records
of the man who was in charge of the deportation of tens of thousands
of Armenians during World War I, when the genocide began.

A book published in Turkey in January quotes records left by Mehmed
Talat, the Ottoman Empire's interior minister during that period. By
the numbers, the population of Armenians in the empire fell
dramatically in 1915-1916, from just under 1.3 million to a little
more than 280,000. Almost 1 million people simply disappeared from the
records.

The modern-day Turkish government, as always, has little to say about
the figures beyond its standard line about there being a war on, and
the Armenians were treacherously supporting Russia, the Ottomans'
ancient enemy.

As always, that story doesn't wash. The armed opposition of a tiny
handful of Armenians doesn't explain the Ottomans' perceived need to
deport, starve and kill some 1.5 million people, many thousands of
them old men, women and children.

This revelation will add new fuel to the campaign for official
American recognition of the genocide. April 24, the traditional day
marking the beginning of the genocide, is coming up, and with it a
renewed effort to put the American government on record acknowledging
those awful events.

To that end, a group of congressmen who've lobbied hard for genocide
recognition has sent a letter to President Barack Obama, calling on
him to fulfill his earlier support, as a senator and presidential
candidate, for American recognition of the genocide. The group is led
by Rep. George Radanovich -- a co-author of the Armenian Genocide
Resolution -- and includes Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, Mark Kirk,
R-Ill., and Frank Pallone, D-N.J.

There will be considerable pressure brought to bear on Obama to
continue the denial of the Armenian genocide that has characterized
presidents of both parties for decades. The argument has been that the
U.S. relationship with Turkey would be threatened by recognizing the
historical fact of the genocide, given the Turks' intransigence on the
subject.

It's time for that to end.

Nearly a Million Genocide Victims, Covered in a Cloak of Amnesia

2009-03-10T11:41:00.001-04:00

The New York Times
Published: March 8, 2009

ISTANBUL ' For Turkey, the number should have been a bombshell.
Nearly a Million Genocide Victims, Covered in a Cloak of Amnesia

Ottoman Armenians are marched to a prison by armed Turkish soldiers in
April 1915. About 972,000 Armenians disappeared from population
records in 1915 and 1916.

Times Topics: Armenian GenocideAccording to a long-hidden document
that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000
Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from
1915 through 1916.

In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians
can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a
book in January, the number ' and its Ottoman source ' has gone
virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television
shows have not discussed it.

`Nothing,' said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who
compiled the book.

The silence can mean only one thing, he said: `My numbers are too high
for ordinary people. Maybe people aren't ready to talk about it yet.'

For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the
Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians
were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the
population. Turkey locked the ugliest parts of its past out of sight,
Soviet-style, keeping any mention of the events out of schoolbooks and
official narratives in an aggressive campaign of forgetting.

But in the past 10 years, as civil society has flourished here, some
parts of Turkish society are now openly questioning the state's
version of events. In December, a group of intellectuals circulated a
petition that apologized for the denial of the massacres. Some 29,000
people have signed it.

With his book, `The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha,' Mr. Bardakci
(pronounced bard-AK-chuh) has become, rather unwillingly, part of this
ferment. The book is a collection of documents and records that once
belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect
of the Armenian deportations.

The documents, given to Mr. Bardakci by Mr. Talat's widow, Hayriye,
before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before
1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to
the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later,
Mr. Bardakci said.

To the untrained ear, it is simply a sad statistic. But anyone
familiar with the issue knows the numbers are in fierce
dispute. Turkey has never acknowledged a specific number of deportees
or deaths. On Sunday, Turkey's foreign minister warned that President
Obama might set back relations if he recognized the massacre of
Armenians as genocide before his visit to Turkey next month.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was bloody, the Turkish argument
goes, and those who died were victims of that chaos.

Mr. Bardakci subscribes to that view. The figures, he said, do not
indicate the number of dead, only a result of the decline in the
Armenian population after deportation. He strongly disagrees that the
massacres amounted to a genocide, and he says Turkey was obliged to
take action against Armenians because they were openly supporting
Russia in its war against the Ottoman Empire.

`It was not a Nazi policy or a Holocaust,' he said. `These were very
dark times. It was a very difficult decision. But deportation was the
outcome of some very bloody events. It was necessary for the
government to deport the Armenian population.'

This argument is rejected by most scholars, who believe that the small
number of Armenian rebels were not a serious threat to the Ottoman
Empire, and that the policy was more the product of the perception
that the Armenians, non-Muslims and therefore considered
untrustworthy, were a problem population.

Hilmar Kaiser, a historian and expert on the Armenian genocide, said
the records published in the book were conclusive proof from the
Ottoman authority itself that it had pursued a calculated policy to
eliminate the Armenians. `You have suddenly on one page confirmation
of the numbers,' he said. `It was like someone hit you over the head
with a club.'

Mr. Kaiser said the before and after figures amounted to `a death
record.'

`There is no other way of viewing this document,' he said. `You can't
just hide a million people.'

Other scholars said that the number was a useful addition to the
historical record, but that it did not introduce a new version of
events.

`This corroborates what we already knew,' said Donald Bloxham, the
author of `The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and
the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians.'

Mr. Bardakci is a history buff who learned to read and write Ottoman
script from his grandmother, allowing him to navigate Turkey's written
past, something that most Turks are unable to do. He plays the tanbur,
a traditional string instrument. His grandfather was a member of the
same political party of Mr. Talat, and his family knew many of the
important political figures in Turkey's founding.

Though he clearly wanted the numbers to be known, he stubbornly
refuses to interpret them. He offers no analysis in the book, and
aside from an interview with Mr. Talat's widow, there is virtually no
text beside the original documents.

`I didn't want to interpret,' he said. `I want the reader to decide.'

The best way to do that, he argues, is by using cold, hard facts,
which can cut through the layers of emotional rhetoric that have
clouded the issue for years.

`I believe we need documents in Turkey,' he said. `This is the most
important.'

But some of the keenest observers of Turkish society said the silence
was a sign of just how taboo the topic still was. `The importance of
the book is obvious from the fact that no paper except Milliyet has
written a single line about it,' wrote Murat Belge, a Turkish
academic, in a January column in the liberal daily newspaper Taraf.

Still, it is a measure of Turkey's democratic maturity that the book
was published here at all. Mr. Bardakci said he had held the documents
for so long ' 27 years ' because he was waiting for Turkey to reach
the point when their publication would not cause a frenzy.

Even the state now feels the need to defend itself. Last summer, a
propaganda film about the Armenians made by Turkey's military was
distributed to primary schools. After a public outcry, it was stopped.

`I could never have published this book 10 years ago,' Mr. Bardakci
said. `I would have been called a traitor.'

He added, `The mentality has changed.'

Israel, Turkey and the politics of genocide

2009-01-30T12:31:00.002-05:00

GERALD CAPLAN

Globe and Mail Update

January 23, 2009 at 1:34 PM EST

http://www.theglobeandmail.com

President Obama — I love saying those words — has momentarily united the world. Almost. Among the exceptions, though barely noticed by the mainstream media, is the estrangement of Turkey and Israel, previously staunch allies in the turbulent Middle East.

At first blush, this alliance may seem counterintuitive, but in fact it makes good strategic sense for both countries. Israel gets a warm working relationship with one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, while enriching Israel's all-important industrial-military complex. Less than two months ago, for instance, came the news of a deal worth $140-million to Israeli firms to upgrade Turkey's air force. In the hard-boiled, realpolitik terms that determine Israel's strategies, it's a no-brainer. Almost.

In return, Turkey gets military, economic and diplomatic benefits. But it also gets something less tangible, something that matters deeply for reasons hard for outsiders to grasp. As part of the Faustian bargain between the two countries, a succession of Israeli governments of all stripes has adamantly refused to recognize that in 1915 the Turkish government was responsible for launching a genocide against its Armenian minority. Some 1.5-million Armenian women, men and children were successfully killed.

I should make clear that this Israeli position is not held casually. On the contrary. Over the years Israelis, with a few notably courageous exceptions, have actually worked against attempts to safeguard the memory of the Armenian genocide. (The bible on this issue is the excellent book by an Israeli, Yair Auron, called The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, 2003.)

For many, this may well be a pretty esoteric sidebar to the world's many crises. But readers need to understand that every Turkish government for almost a century now has passionately denied that a genocide took place at all. Yet the vast majority of disinterested scholars of genocide have publicly affirmed that it was indeed a genocide, one of the small number in the 20th century (with the Holocaust and Rwanda) that have incontestably met the definition set down in the UN's 1948 Genocide Convention.

For Armenians in the Western world, even after 94 years, nothing is more important than persuading other governments to recognize this. For Turkish authorities, even after 94 years, nothing is more important than preventing that recognition. In that pursuit, Israel has been perhaps Turkey's most powerful ally. After all, if the keepers of the memory of the Holocaust don't acknowledge 1915, why should anyone else?

But the Israeli-Turkish bargain goes well beyond Israel. Not only is Israel, of all the unlikely states in the world, a genocide denier, but also many established Jewish organizations in other countries, especially the United States, have followed suit. In the United States, those who argue that denying the Holocaust is psychologically tantamount to a second holocaust have taken the lead in pressuring presidents and Congress against recognizing the reality of 1915. Resolutions calling for recognition are regularly pushed by American-Armenians and their many supporters. Jewish groups regularly lead the opposition. Some believe that members of these groups in fact understand perfectly well the rights and wrongs of the case. But a mindset that backs any and all Israeli government initiatives trumps all else. And successfully. Repeated attempts in Congress to pass this resolution has failed, even though the list of nations that now recognizes the Armenian genocide has grown steadily and, thanks to Stephen Harper, now includes Canada.

It is this rather unseemly, if not unholy, Israeli-Turkish deal that has been among the many victims of the latest Israeli attack on Gaza. Whether the Israelis anticipated it or not, the Turkish government turned against its erstwhile ally with a vengeance, pulling few punches. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan accused Israel of "perpetrating inhuman actions which would bring it to self-destruction. Allah will sooner or later punish those who transgress the rights of innocents." Mr. Erdogan described Israel's attack on Gaza as "savagery" and a "crime against humanity."

Israel formally described this language as "unacceptable" and certain Israeli media outlets have raised the stakes. The Jerusalem Post editorialized that given Turkey's record of killing tens of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq, "we're not convinced that Turkey has earned the right to lecture Israelis about human rights." Israel's deputy foreign minister was even more pointed: "Erdogan says that genocide is taking place in Gaza. We [Israel] will then recognize the Armenian-related events as genocide." Suddenly, genocide turns into a geopolitical pawn.

It isn't easy to choose a winner in the cynicism stakes here. Here's what one Turkish columnist, Barcin Yinanc, shrewdly wrote: "When April comes, I can imagine the [Turkish] government instructing its Ambassador to Israel to mobilize the Israeli government to stop the Armenian initiatives in the U.S. Congress. I can hear some Israelis telling the Turkish Ambassador to go talk to Hamas to lobby the Congress."

I'm guessing some readers work on the naïve assumption that an event is deemed genocidal based on the facts of the case. Silly you. In the real world, you call it genocide if it bolsters your interests. If it doesn't, it's not. It's actually the same story as with preventing genocide.

What happens now? Candidate Obama twice pledged that he would recognize the Armenian claim of genocide. But so had candidate George W. Bush eight years earlier, until he was elected and faced the Turkish/Jewish lobby. Armenian-Americans and their backers are already pressing Mr. Obama to fulfill his pledge. With the Turkish-Israeli alliance deeply strained, the position of the leading Jewish organizations is very much in question this time. Whatever the outcome, be sure that politics, not genocide, will be the decisive factor.

Gerald Caplan, author of The Betrayal of Africa, writes frequently on issues related to genocide.

When it comes to Gaza, leave the Second World War out of it

2009-01-17T23:58:00.000-05:00

Robert Fisk's World: When it comes to Gaza, leave the Second World War
out of it

How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis?

Saturday, 17 January 2009
Independent.co.uk  Web

Exaggeration always gets my goat. I started to hate it back in the
1970s when the Provisional IRA claimed that Long Kesh internment camp
was "worse than Belsen". It wasn't as if there was anything nice about
Long Kesh ` or the Maze prison as it was later politely dubbed ` but it
simply wasn't as bad as Belsen. And now we're off again. Passing
through Paris this week, I found pro-Palestinian demonstrators carrying
signs which read "Gaza, it's Guernica" and "Gaza-sur-Glane".


Guernica, as we all know, was the Basque city razed by the Luftwaffe in
1937 and Oradour-sur-Glane the French village whose occupants were
murdered by the SS in 1944. Israel's savagery in Gaza has also been
compared to a "genocide" and ` of course ` a "holocaust". The French
Union of Islamic Organisations called it "a genocide without precedent"
` which does take the biscuit when even the Pope's "minister for peace
and justice" has compared Gaza to "a big concentration camp".

Before I state the obvious, I only wish the French Union of Islamic
Organisations would call the Armenian genocide a genocide ` it doesn't
have the courage to do so, does it, because that would be offensive to
the Turks and, well, the million and a half Armenians massacred in 1915
happened to be, er, Christians.

Mind you, that didn't stop George Bush from dropping the word from his
vocabulary lest he, too, should offend the Turkish generals whose
airbases America needs for its continuing campaign in Iraq. And even
Israel doesn't use the word "genocide" about the Armenians lest it
loses its only Muslim ally in the Middle East. Strange, isn't it? When
there's a real genocide ` of Armenians ` we don't like to use the word.
But when there is no genocide, everyone wants to get in on the act.

Yes, I know what all these people are trying to do: make a direct
connection between Israel and Hitler's Germany. And in several radio
interviews this past week, I've heard a good deal of condemnation about
such comparisons. How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being
called Nazis? How can anyone compare the Israeli army to the Wehrmacht?
Merely to make such a parallel is an act of anti-Semitism.

Having come under fire from the Israeli army on many occasions, I'm not
sure that's necessarily true. I've never understood why strafing the
roads of northern France in 1940 was a war crime while strafing the
roads of southern Lebanon is not a war crime. The massacre of up to
1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps ` perpetrated by
Israel's Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli soldiers watched and
did nothing ` falls pretty much into the Second World War bracket.
Israel's own estimate of the dead ` a paltry 460 ` was only nine fewer
than the Nazi massacre at the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 when
almost 300 women and children were also sent to RavensbrÃ¼ck (a real
concentration camp). Lidice was destroyed in revenge for the murder by
Allied agents of Reinhard Heydrich. The Palestinians were slaughtered
after Ariel Sharon told the world ` untruthfully ` that a Palestinian
had murdered the Lebanese Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.

Indeed, it was the courageous Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz of the
Hebrew University (and editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica) who wrote
that the Sabra and Chatila massacre "was done by us. The Phalangists
are our mercenaries, exactly as the Ukrainians and the Croatians and
the Slovakians were the mercenaries of Hitler, who organised them as
soldiers to do the work for him. Even so have we organised the
assassins of Lebanon in order to murder the Palestinians". Remarks like
these were greeted by Israel's then minister of interior and religious
affairs, Yosef Burg, with the imperishable words: "Christians killed
Muslims ` how are the Jews guilty?"

I have long raged against any comparisons with the Second World War `
whether of the Arafat-is-Hitler variety once deployed by Menachem Begin
or of the anti-war-demonstrators-are-1930s-appeasers,
most recently
used by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. And pro-Palestinian
marchers should think twice before they start waffling about genocide
when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem once shook Hitler's hand and said `
in Berlin on 2 November 1943, to be precise ` "The Germans know how to
get rid of the Jews... They have definitely solved the Jewish problem."
The Grand Mufti, it need hardly be added, was a Palestinian. He lies
today in a shabby grave about two miles from my Beirut home.

No, the real reason why "Gaza-Genocide" is a dangerous parallel is
because it is not true. Gaza's one and a half million refugees are
treated outrageously enough, but they are not being herded into gas
chambers or forced on death marches. That the Israeli army is a rabble
is not in question ` though I was amused to read one of Newsweek's
regular correspondents calling it "splendid" last week ` but that does
not mean they are all war criminals. The issue, surely, is that war
crimes do appear to have been committed in Gaza. Firing at UN schools
is a criminal act. It breaks every International Red Cross protocol.
There is no excuse for the killing of so many women and children.

I should add that I had a sneaking sympathy for the Syrian foreign
minister who this week asked why a whole international tribunal has
been set up in the Hague to investigate the murder of one man `=2
0
Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri ` while no such tribunal is set
up to investigate the deaths of more than 1,000 Palestinians.

I should add, however, that the Hague tribunal may well be pointing the
finger at Syria and I would still like to see a tribunal set up into
the Syrian massacre at Hama in 1982 when thousands of civilians were
shot at the hands of Rifaat al-Assad's special forces. The aforesaid
Rifaat, I should add, today lives safely within the European Union. And
how about a trial for the Israeli artillerymen who massacred 106
civilians ` more than half of them children ` at the UN base at Qana in
1996?

What this is really about is international law. It's about
accountability. It's about justice ` something the Palestinians have
never received ` and it's about bringing criminals to trial. Arab war
criminals, Israeli war criminals ` the whole lot. And don't say it
cannot be done. Wasn't that the message behind the Yugoslav tribunal?
Didn't some of the murderers get their just deserts? Just leave the
Second World War out of it.

Thousands of Turks Apologize to Armenians

2009-01-14T15:52:00.001-05:00

Blogian on 24 Dec 2008

While I have received a number of personal letters from individual Turks apologizing for the Genocide, this one is addressed to all Armenians: “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.”

The thousands of Turkish signatories of the apology statement are not saying sorry for the genocide itself (which they call “the Great Catastrophe,” translating from the Armenian Metz Yeghern). The apology is for the convenient “ignorance” and “denial” about the WWI extermination of Ottoman Empire’s indigenous Armenians for about nine decades. The message, as I see it, is not recognizing a historical fact but recognizing humanity. To recognize genocide means to recognize a victim group’s humanity. The reverse can, apparently, be true as well.

What is also true is that there are thousands of Turks who are willing to risk their lives and comfort in order to break an ancient silence. As one Turkish friend told me, “[i]t’s a bit like putting your name on a ‘wanted’ list.” The “wanted list” is pretty big: over 22,000 signatures on the main website, http://www.ozurdiliyoruz.com/, by December 24, 2008, and over 3,400 on Facebook (as of Dec 20) with their real names and photographs (the Facebook event list seems to have since become a private one).

On the other hand, all that Armenians have received for losing a homeland and memory through genocide is a 90-year-late “apology” by a group of people some of whose signatories don’t hide its strategy. One initiator, for instance, has been quoted as suggesting in one Turkish-language newspaper that the apology is a service to the Republic of Turkey in the sense that it will kill genocide recognition by other countries. Furthermore, earlier this year, in my indigenous politics class, the professor and many students were not satisfied with Australia’s and Canada’s official apology to their indigenous peoples for genocidal policies. So in general, an “apology” is not well received by victim groups.

What is undeniable, nonetheless, is that this apology has full of potential. One would not even imagine such an apology five years ago. One would not imagine that Turkish parliamentarians would discuss the matter, even some of them using the Kurdish term “genocide” to refer to the Armenian extermination.

The apology has also brought out the paradoxical Turkish society. Turkey’s ceremonial president Abdullah Gul has defended the signatories (unlike the “real” Turkish leader, vice president Erdogan). At the same time, though, Gul is suing a nationalist Turkish parliamentarian for saying the president has Armenian roots and that’s why he defends the apology. This is also the same Gul who has attended a ceremonial killing of Armenian soldiers in Turkey. But this is also the same Gul who visited Armenia this year and wanted to improve relations.

Nevertheless, Turkish media are openly calling Canan Arıtman, the female member of a social-democratic party who suggested Gul is a traitor because of his alleged Armenian origin, a “fascist” and a “racist.” Suggesting that the politician be expelled from her party, one Turkish columnist writing for Sabah says, “Arıtman is racist. What place can racism and questioning ethnic origins have in social democracy, an ideology that has freedom, equality and brotherhood as its fundamental tenets?”

Writing even harsher, a liberal Turkish columnist asks what if all Turks have Armenian origin:

“Arıtman and those like her are the strongest reason we have to apologize to the Armenian community. If these people can readily put into circulation statements that are racist, low and self-aggrandizing, the entire community is responsible for that. We all have a share in this crime. I have questions to ask people who approach this issue reluctantly and who think that it is unnecessary as an agenda item. Have you ever thought about this? Maybe we are all really Armenians. We may all have people in our lineage who were forced to act like Muslim Turks.”

A Zaman columnist says Turks “should thank the racist CHP deputy” for reminding the history of her political party. Apparently that political party is the hereditary of the chauvinist “Union and Progress” that committed the Genocide in 1915.

Furthermore, some of Arıtman’s colleagues in the parliament have compared her to Hitler: “”It was a similar stance that led German dictator Adolf Hitler to burn thousands of people of Jewish origin. Arıtman sees Armenians as enemies.”

When was the last time when any media in Turkey was outraged against insulting Armenians? Indeed this is unprecedented and demonstrates the power of the apology – no matte how vague and not-enough it may be. This maybe the reason why there is so much ultranationalist outrage in Turkey against the apology (even if some self-perceived progressives silently suggest the apology serves Turkey’s national interests). The website of the apology, for instance, was “suspended” according to a message which appeared on it around 1:30 AM standard US eastern time on December 23, 2008. Days ago it was also hacked. Furthermore, a group of nationalists have opened their own website called “I don’t apologize.” Almost 50,000 nationalists have signed it as of December 24. Another counter campaign claims twice as many supporters, although neither websites have received much - if any coverage - in Turkish or other media.

Hated by Turkish ultranationalists, the apology initiative has inspired similar (though low-profile) campaigns in the region. I have received a text that is being circulated among Cypriot Turks and Greeks asking both communities to apologize to each other:

“Initiative for Apologizing for the atrocities committed by ones’ own community

1. This is an initiative to collect signatures on a document apologizing for the atrocities committed by ones’ own community against the other. Following the initiative of 200 Turkish intellectuals, who found the courage to apologize for the Armenian genocide, we believe it is time for Cypriots to assume responsibility for the crimes allegedly committed in their name and to express regret and condemnation.

2. The initiative also aims at putting an end to the decades- long practice of concealing the truth about the events, of denying that they ever took place or attempt to justify them. This amounts to a crime of massacre denial which can no longer be tolerated. At the same time each one of us must assume responsibility for the actions we can take as parents, teachers, activists, journalists, politicians to put an end to the decades-long conspiracy of silence about our regrettable past.

3. We call on all interested persons and organizations to engage in a process of consultation on how best to promote this initiative and to formulate the text to be signed.”

Full of more potential for good than for bad, the Turkish apology is one that surprises many. In fact, it might not have been possible without one person. According to the Irish Times:

“[...]

Others attribute the initiative to the shock that followed the murder of the Armenian-Turkish editor Hrant Dink. A leading advocate of a more humane debate on the Armenian issue, Dink was gunned down by a nationalist teenager in January 2007.

“When he died, it was as if a veil had been torn from the eyes of the democratic-minded citizens of this country,” says Nil Mutluer, a feminist activist who signed the letter. “People realised there was no time to be lost.”

The road ahead looks hard. The chief organisers of the 1915 massacres continue to be commemorated in street names across the country….”

The road is a hard one, but not unprecedented. Around the globe, there is a global recognition of indigenous rights which have often been repressed through genocidal policies. One such injustice was recently corrected by the country of Nicaragua when it gave title of traditional land to a native nation. A simple apology seems to please many Armenians, though, even it comes froma group of liberal Turks who are ashamed of a 90-year-old campaign to silence and rewrite history.

When I gave my father a print-out of the apology in western Armenian, his initial reaction was: “They took all of our land and memory and all they give us is an apology by a group of small people who don’t even use the word genocide?” To my surprise, he then added, “I accept their apology.”

And earlier this April, when a group of Turkish lobbyists and community organizers denied the Armenian genocide during a commemorative lecture at University of Denver, an Armenian friend of mine (who openly calls himself a nationalist), said to the audience that if a Turk told him “sorry” for the Genocide he would give that Turk a “big, Armenian hug.”

My friend owes 20,000 Turks big, Armenian hugs. Let’s hope the number grows so big that he will never be able to give so many hugs in 90 years.

Turk Gives Away Family Land as Genocide Reparation

2009-01-14T14:49:00.003-05:00

Blogian on 09 Jan 2009

Encouraged by the recent apology to Armenians by thousands of Turkish intelectuals and disissidents, a Turkish citizen has done the unprecedented: Berzan Boti (not his real name) of Siirt is giving all the land he inherited to an Assyrian organization. Along with Armenians, indigenous Assyrians were also victims of the WWI genocide at the hands of Ottoman Empire’s government during WWI:

Boti’s letter to Sabri Atman, founder and director of the Assyrian Seyfo Center in Europe who will now be responsible for the returned land (south of the Lake Van), states:

“When I found out that the properties that I and my brothers inherited from our father wasn’t our own, but properties taken from the murdered Assyrians in 1915 I felt an indescribable feeling of guilt and shame. I’ve been thinking long and hard before I have come to this decision. I tried to put myself in their position. I have personally apologized to every Assyrian and Armenian I’ve met. But this does not get rid of the crime our ancestors committed. Even if I am personally not responsible for what happened in 1915, I felt as I had to do more than just to apologize. Finally, I came to the decision to give back all properties that I inherited from my forefathers to Seyfo Center, which works for the recognition of the Seyfo (Assyrian) genocide in 1915” (slightly edited - Blogian).

“Sorry” Seems to Be the Hardest Word: Turkish elites agonize over apology campaign

2009-01-13T15:06:00.002-05:00

A Commentary by Jirair Haratunian
Trustee, Armenian Assembly of America
http://www.aaainc.org Published: 09 January, 2009

For the past few weeks Turkey has been agonizing over an internet petition initiated by a group of Turkish intellectuals apologizing for the 1915 “Great Catastrophe” that befell the Armenian population in Anatolia. The campaign ignited a counter movement led by former Turkish ambassadors and a sharp rebuke by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Prime Minister said, “If there was a crime let those who committed it apologize. My nation, my country has no such issue.”

Curiously, President Abdullah Gul initially characterized the petition as evidence that Turkey is committed to the democratic principle of free expression, but on January 1, after much criticism for his passive reaction to the apology campaign, he confessed that it was not helpful in the process of negotiations with Armenia.

Remarkably, the latest reports say that 26,000 signatories have registered their personal apology to the internet petition, and the Turkish media has headlined the campaign as a major news story for weeks. They also gave wide coverage to the Armenian Assembly of America statement quoting its Executive Director, Bryan Ardouny, who said, “An irreversible trend has commenced in Turkey. This public apology is a first step in that direction and will inevitably lead Turkey in coming to grips with its genocidal past.”

The petition’s authors carefully avoided using the “Genocide” label in their apology statement. Instead they called the horrors of 1915 “The Great Catastrophe,” a term that in Armenian is called “Medz Yeghern.” This was widely used by Armenians before Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide. The petition also avoided asking the Turkish state to recognize the Armenian Genocide in any way. The campaign, the authors asserted, is a means for Turks to personally apologize for the horrors Armenians endured at the hands of the Ottoman regime.

The opposition arguments range from denial of any crimes against Armenians to the comparison of equivalent losses suffered by Turks at the hands of Armenian insurgents. They also recalled the assassination of Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists in the 1970s.

A most interesting phenomenon in Turkey took place on the 32nd day of the apology petition when the Turkish State Television network broadcast a debate between three advocates and three retired ambassadors who opposed the petition.

The moderator opened the debate noting its objectives. He said, “At the root of the issue lies what happened to the Armenians in 1915: was it a catastrophe, genocide, or deportation? Should we apologize? To whom and for what should we apologize?”

One of the authors of the apology petition, Dr. Cengiz Aktar, explained, “We apologized for not being able to talk about this for many years. We also apologize for not being able to share the pain of our Armenian brothers and sisters to a sufficient extent.”

In response, former Ambassador Sukru Elekdag said, in part, “First they are referring to ‘The Great Catastrophe’ which is a synonym for genocide.” He complained that the petitioners were only telling part of the story. “There was a deportation decision of course, but this was done in legitimate self defense during conditions of war. The Russian army was advancing and Armenians took up arms and joined that army.”

The moderator asked whether the apology petition makes a positive contribution to solving the difficult issues between Turkey and Armenia. Elekdag replied, “This campaign cannot serve a useful purpose.” He noted that secret negotiations exist between Ankara and Yerevan and that the Turkish proposal for a joint historic commission to examine the history of the period was part of the negotiations.

Opponents also declared that the petition strengthens the Armenian position on the issue in international quarters where the Armenian Diaspora campaigns for international recognition of genocide.

Dr. Aktar made a passionate defense of the petition. He said that the petition involved individual and personal apologies and does not address itself to either the Armenian or Turkish governments. He said responses from Armenians were positive. “They are giving a positive response with tears in their eyes because they are finally seeing a compassionate response after 90 years.”

He also addressed the assertions that it was only deportation that was sanctioned by the Ottoman government. He said, “The truth of the matter is that the deportations were one of the biggest calamities that ever happened in Anatolia. The Anatolian economy collapsed because of this irrational decision, and from that time until today the economy has not been revived in eastern Anatolia.”

This television debate was a watershed event in Turkey. It illuminated the differing sides of the genocide issue at a time when Ankara has indicated an interest in changing its rigid policy towards Armenia. It is a step away from past positions that sought to isolate Armenia politically and economically. Instead, despite opposition from Azerbaijan, Turkey has offered a program to establish a stability and security platform in the Caucasus that includes both Armenia and Russia. This, in addition to bilateral negotiations with Armenia, are positive but fragile developments that will hopefully ease tensions and lead to a more normal and stable relationship between Armenia and Turkey who, in the final analysis, are destined to remain permanent neighbors.

Armenian genocide

2008-12-30T16:24:00.005-05:00

I found this link http://www.washingtontimes.com where the writer is a Turk and denies Armenian genocide.I found interesting the comment that 'Manuel' posted in regards to the article.

Read it here:

"oplu. I do know the background of the writer, she has written articles on this site as well as her Turkish Digest website as well having her articles printed in blatantly nationalist websites.
I am sorry you feel that way about Armenians, in my first comment I did not make any comments about Turks as a whole but only regarding the writer and the Turkish government. I am well aware of the fact that Turks helped save thousands of Armenians during the Genocide and they are risking their lives today by daring to talk about it and raising the issue in public. Your comments regarding all Armenians are blatantly racist - please read them again yourself.
The writer tries to use a quote by Winston Churchill regarding what constitutes a fanatic. If she had researched the subject properly she would have known that Winston Churchill referred to what happened to the Armenians as 'administrative Holocaust'.
The reason why Armenians are not warm to the subject of a joint commission is that only a handful of historians and the Turkish government believe it was not Genocide, but mainly because while it has suggested the commission it has quashed any debate on the subject in Turkey - Why - let there be open, honest, full debate on the subject in Turkey first - without the hatred and death threats towards those Turks speaking their minds? After over 90 years of distortion of facts in Turkey - it is only now that the debate has begun, Turkey should find out for itself what happened in 1915 openly and honestly - before suggesting a 'joint commission' .
Every time this debate is raised the question of Nagorno Kharabagh is raised - as if somehow the present has a hand in the past. Nachichevan and areas including Kharabagh were annexed to Azerbaijan from Armenia by Russia, thats why the population of kharabagh was predominantly Armenian ( and yes there were ethnic Azeris, and yes they were forced out and they should ultimately be given the right to return).
I agree there should be understanding and peace between the two neighbours, but it can only be done with acceptance of the truth. The book for which the Turkish publisher was imprisoned was called ' The truth will set us free' - about how the writers family was saved by a Turkish family it was a book on understanding and reconciliation, but as I said 301 was used to imprison the publisher. I don't believe the Turkish population is racist, just the Nationalists as well as prominent politicians, these are the people who sadly still control Turkey, and before you get angry at this comment let me quote you the Turkish Defense ministers statement made in a speech in Brussels last month (the heart of Europe) 'Turkey would not have been the country it is had the Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians....been allowed to stay' what does that say about the willingness of a 21 century modern country leadership say about that countries present ideology and willingness to look at history objectively?

Understandably being a Turk, the writer of this article would not like to admit that what happened in 1915 was Genocide.
No other choice has been left to Armenians around the world, but to ask the governments of the countries they live to recognize the Genocide, up until now there has been no debate on the subject in Turkey, the term 'Armenian' is still an insult of the highest order even used by politicians (used recently as last week against the president of Turkey). Sadly article 301 in Turkey is still used to prosecute anyone who uses the words Armenian Genocide, one assistant publisher has just been imprisoned for having published a book by an Armenian writer.
One myth I keep hearing especially in Turkish newspapers etc. is that the Armenian lobby group is very powerful, to put matters straight - compared to the tens of millions spent on US lobby groups by Turkey and the fact that any high ranking Turkish minister can pick up the phone and call his/her counterpart in the US ( as happened with Clinton at a previous vote) the Armenian lobby groups are no match. Instead of suggesting Mr. Obama should look into what happened in 1915, the writer should be advised to go back to Turkey and find out the facts for themselves, it is only now that they can research the subject there more freely. One of the reasons why debate has sprung up is because the Armenian diaspora has pushed the issue, if not Turkey would have buried the issue long ago just as it buried the million plus Armenians in 1915."
December 24, 2008 at 11:39 a.m.

Online apology for the Armenian genocide

2008-12-23T20:25:00.001-05:00

After more than 90 years, Turkey is about to breaking a long-held taboo. An online petition, apologizing for the killing of Armenians in 1915, has been issued by prominent Turkish academics.

Watch the video here:
http://www.france24.com/en/20081222-report-turkey-killing-armenians-text-apology-

Convince Raphael Lemkin Otherwise!

2008-12-11T11:42:00.001-05:00

HYE-TERT
Dec 10 2008
Turkey

The Armenian Genocide has been officially recognized by Turkey,
United States, Great Britain, Israel and many more countries, but we
just couldn't see it.

By Vicken Babkenian, an independent researcher for the Australian
Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney, Australia,
3 December 2008

It all began when I was cutting an Orange for my niece when she asked
me why the name Orange is both a color and a fruit. After doing some
research, I discovered that the root of the word Orange in the English
language is derived from the fruit. In other words the Etymology of
the color and the fruit is interconnected. No one can argue that the
fruit Orange is not Orange.

As someone who has studied the Armenian Genocide over a number of
years, I could not help but familiarize myself with the etymology of
the word Genocide. I discovered that the word genocide is from the
roots genos (Greek for family, tribe, race, a people, a nation) and
-cide (Latin - occidere or cideo - to Massacre, Kill, exterminate). I
looked up the word in the Oxford dictionary and found the definition to
be "the extermination of a race". I then recalled that this definition
of the word 'genocide' had been used by contemporary eyewitnesses,
diplomats, historians, journalists to describe what was happening to
the Armenians during WWI. Lord James Bryce in 1915 called it "the
Extermination of a Race" in a New York Times article. If the word
'genocide' had been coined before WWI, then that one word would have
been used, instead of the five words which mean the same thing.

I then conducted some research on Raphael Lemkin, "The founder of the
genocide convention" and on the genesis of the word 'genocide' which
he coined in 1944. In his manuscript titled "Totally unofficial",
Lemkin wrote:

"In 1915 . . . I began . . . to read more history to study whether
national, religious, or racial groups as such were being destroyed. The
truth came out after the war. In Turkey, more than 1,200,000 Armenians
were put to death . . . After the end of the war, some 150 Turkish
war criminals were arrested and interned by the British Government
on the island of Malta . . . Then one day, I read in the newspapers
that all Turkish war criminals were to be released. I was shocked. A
nation that killed and the guilty persons were set free . . . I felt
that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be
adopted by the world"

I soon reached the conclusion that the word genocide is etymologically
interconnected with the tragedy of the Armenians, just like the word
Orange is to the fruit of the same name. The man who coined the word
genocide had in large part based it on the Armenian catastrophe. He
even stated on national television "that it happened to the
Armenians." I further realized that the legal term "Crimes against
humanity" which is affirmed by the U.N general Assembly was in the
main, derived and adopted from a declaration made by the Allies on
24 May 1915 with respect to the initiation of the wartime Armenian
Genocide, which they branded as a "crime against humanity." This
fact is acknowledged by the authoritative UN War Crimes Commission,
History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Development
of the Laws of War.

I searched online to learn which countries had actually signed and
ratified the Genocide Convention. I discovered that most countries
in the world had done so, including the United States, Great Britain,
Turkey, Israel and so on. I concluded that by ratifying the convention
they had in fact recognized that the Armenian holocaust was in fact
a genocide.

Yes, I use the word 'holocaust' because that word was used to
describe what was happening to the Armenians during the Abdul Hamid
Massacres, Adana Massacres and the Armenian genocide by contemporary
writers. William Walker Rockwell in an article titled "the Total
of Armenian and Syrian Dead" in the New York Times Current History
February 1916, wrote "If the ghosts of the Christian civilians who
have perished miserably in Turkey since the commencement of the great
holocaust should march down Fifth Avenue twenty abreast there might
be a million of them ... for most of them will be women and children".

The Armenian genocide has been recognized by the majority of the
nations of the world and we didn't even know it. If those countries
who have ratified the genocide convention deny that the Armenians
were victims of genocide, then they should either terminate their
participation to the convention, or have the convention change the word
'genocide' to something else which is not intrinsically connected to
the Armenian slaughter.

Denying that Armenians were victims of genocide is akin to denying
that an Orange is Orange. It is insane and illogical. For those who
believe that what happened to the Armenians should not be termed a
'genocide', should have convinced Raphael Lemkin not to base the
word on what had happened to the Armenians. Unfortunately for them,
it is too late, by signing the genocide convention; most of the world
has already recognized the Armenian genocide.

Turkish intellectuals give personal apology for 1915 events

2008-12-05T11:57:00.001-05:00

A group of Turkish intellectuals have apologized for the “great disaster that Ottoman Armenians suffered in 1915” but have fallen short of calling on the state to do the same.

A petition initiated by a group of intellectuals, including professors Baskın Oran and Ahmet İnsel, journalists Ali Bayramoğlu and Cengiz Aktar, personally apologizes for the events.

The group is asking other people to sign the petition, which reads as follows: “I cannot conscientiously accept the indifference to the great disaster that Ottoman Armenians suffered in 1915, and its denial. I reject this injustice and acting of my own will, I share the feelings and pains of my Armenian brothers and sisters, and I apologize to them.”

The organizers of the campaign have underlined that first they will collect signatures from intellectuals and they will then open a secure Web site to collect signatures.

Oran pointed out that they had written the text for individuals since the tragedy was very human. “We are searching for human beings. We thought about urging the state to apologize but we decided to let individuals act according to their conscience. This call is for everybody,” he said.

The petition, which has already become the target of nationalists, has led to criticism from other intellectuals.

Aytekin Yıldız, the coordinator of the Confrontation Association (Yüzleşme Derneği), pointed out that the Armenian community was already aware of the fact that there are many people in Turkey of conscience, and the important thing was not to declare what is already known. “It is a good starting point, but not enough. Firstly, what do they mean by ‘great disaster’? Let’s name it, it is genocide. Secondly, the state has to apologize,” Yıldız pointed out.

Historian Ayşe Hür said apologizing is the duty of those who were responsible for the act, or for those who share their arguments. “It seems that a very elite group discussed that petition, because I learnt about this petition from the media and I was surprised,” she said, and added: “I approach these types of events as a scientist, as a historian, not as a member of the Turkish nation. For me, all these events were the fault of Turkish nationalism flourishing at that time, and personally, I don’t identify with it, so I do not feel the need to apologize personally.”

She also pointed out that the petitioners are concentrating only on 1915; however, she says there were events after and before. “There is a state tradition which legitimizes all these events and prevents any discussion about them. Firstly, the state has to ensure a suitable atmosphere to discuss all these things; then it has to apologize on behalf of the perpetrators and for itself, because it has legitimized their actions through the years.”

Another figure, a prominent intellectual who wanted to remain anonymous, said to apologize is not the responsibility of the individual but that of the state. He said Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül’s remarks at a speech he gave in November were not acceptable.

In that speech, the minister suggested that the “success” of the republic lay in the nation-building process. “If there were Greeks in the Aegean and Armenians in most places in Turkey today, would it be the same nation-state? I don’t know what words I can use to explain the importance of the population exchange, but if you look at the former state of affairs, its importance will become very clear,” Gönül said. He added that in those days, Ankara was composed of four neighborhoods -- Armenian, Jewish, Greek and Muslim -- and claimed that after the nation-building process, it became possible to establish a national bourgeoisie.

The Lausanne Treaty, signed in 1923, set in motion a population exchange between Greek Orthodox citizens of the young Turkish Republic and Muslim citizens of Greece, which resulted in the displacement of approximately 2 million people. The Armenian population that was in Turkey before the establishment of Turkish Republic was forced to emigrate in 1915, and, according to some, the conditions of this expulsion are the basis of Armenian claims of genocide.

05 December 2008, Friday
AYŞE KARABAT ANKARA
todayszaman.com

Vatican: "Unspeakable" Armenian Suffering

2008-11-26T12:10:00.001-05:00

ANSA English Media Service

November 24, 2008 Monday 1:09 PM CET
Italy

(ANSA) - Vatican City, November 24 - Pope Benedict XVI on Monday spoke
of the "unspeakable suffering" of the Armenian people but did not
use the word "genocide", a term rejected by Turkey but widely used by
historians. Meeting with the religious head of the Armenian diaspora
in Lebanon, Aram I, the pope said the Armenians had experienced a
"period of unspeakable suffering" during the last century. In Aram's
previous visit to Rome in 1997, Pope John Paul II spoke openly of the
Armenian "genocide". On Monday Aram urged all states to recognise
"all genocides, including that of the Armenians". The use of the
word is strongly contested by Turkey and is one of the stumbling
blocks to Turkey's bid to join the European Union. France passed a
bill two years ago making it an offence to deny that Armenia suffered
"genocide" at the hands of the Turks, but the bill was subsequently
buried in the French Senate after furious Turkish reactions. Armenia
says Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million people systematically in 1915 -
a claim strongly denied by Turkey.

TURKISH JUDGE PUBLICLY CRITICIZES DENIAL OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

2008-11-11T11:48:00.001-05:00

Scores of highly sympathetic articles about the Armenian Genocide have appeared in the Turkish press in recent months, despite Turkey’s repressive laws that make it a crime to discuss this taboo subject.

One such article appeared in the October 30 issue of the liberal newspaper Taraf. It was authored by a very unlikely writer -- Judge Faruk Ozsu from Odemish, near Izmir. This is probably the first time that a sitting Turkish judge publicly expresses such daring thoughts in violation of article 301 of the penal code. He criticizes and mocks the Turkish government’s distorted version of the Armenian Genocide that has been fed to the public for decades.

Judge Ozsu asserts that Turkish denialists contradict themselves by first denying that anything happened in 1915 and then stating that those killings were committed "in defense of the homeland."

Referring to the three Turks, recently sentenced by a Swiss Court for denying the Armenian Genocide, Judge Ozsu writes that contrary to widespread Turkish misrepresentation Switzerland did not restrict freedom of expression, but in fact upheld human dignity. Moreover, he ridicules all those who claim that "from the point of view of freedom of expression, Turkey is more advanced that Switzerland" -- a statement he characterizes as a hilarious comedy! In his judgment, those toeing the official Turkish line on the Armenian Genocide are "blind patriots" who accuse of treason anyone expressing the slightest human sensibility on this subject.

Judge Ozsu describes himself as "a simple man who has not lost his conscience, despite his nationalistic education." He explains that since Switzerland has acknowledged 1915 as genocide, everyone in that country is obliged to obey the law of the land. He goes on to quote Elie Wiesel as saying that the denial of genocide is the continuation of genocide. That is why, the Judge writes, "it is mandatory that denial be deemed a crime."

The Honorable Judge further contends that the denial of genocide is unrelated to the scholarly investigation of facts. He condemns French historian Gilles Weinstein and Turkish Professor Baskin Oran for claiming that "there are no documents proving that the killings were committed according to a government plan, therefore it is not possible to qualify these events as genocide." In the Judge’s view, those making such comments are simply trying to save their necks from "the claws of article 301."

In a direct reference to Dogu Perincek who was convicted by the Swiss Supreme Court last year for denying the Armenian Genocide, Judge Ozsu made the following observations:

- "Perincek’s association bears the name of Talaat Pasha who is viewed as a ‘Turkish Hitler.’"

- "Those who declare that the Armenian Genocide is ‘an imperialist lie,’ show no respect for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, but exclaim: ‘Long live the Ittihadists; we were right [to kill the Armenians] and we can do the same thing now,’ then the only person who will pay attention to them is a Swiss judge."

- "Disputing the genocide, making racist statements, and praising the commission of a crime is now a legal issue in Switzerland, and not an attempt to seek the truth through scientific inquiry."

To be sure, the Judge takes a dim view of his country’s educational system which keeps Turks in a state of ignorance about 1915, while people outside Turkey, who have not had a "Turkish education," view things differently. Explaining that the term genocide was coined by a Polish-Jewish attorney named Raphael Lemkin in 1933, in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, and before the Holocaust had taken place, which means that "the Genocide Convention signed by Turkey was inspired by the Armenian Genocide."

The Judge is particularly irate at the Turkish government’s insensitivity toward the mass killings of Armenians. He states: "The official Turkish position is that during the war Armenians from certain regions were temporarily sent to the Southern region and during that period about 300,000 Armenians perished due to different circumstances. Any Turk who has not been through ‘Turkish education’ and has kept his conscience intact, upon hearing the 300,000 figure, would say, ‘Oh My God’ and will start thinking about that number."

Consequently, the Judge suggests that the first thing Turks should do is "to state that we feel terrible regarding these events…. Those who died at that time were not our enemies, but our citizens. Some of those who died were children. No one can speak of children as enemies."

Judge Ozsu concludes: "The Swiss Court’s verdict is neither against democracy nor freedom of expression. Switzerland simply does not allow the events leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to be characterized by racist and insensitive words that insult people’s dignity. Switzerland simply does not allow that the victim be victimized for a second time!"

Given the Turkish government’s well-established record of punishing all factual references to the Armenian Genocide, we fear that this righteous judge may be dismissed from his job and even get imprisoned for simply telling the truth!

By Harut Sassounian, Publisher, The California Courier

NEW DOCUMENT ON THE TURKISH ANTI-ARMENIAN POLICY IN 1934

2008-11-04T12:45:00.003-05:00

armradio.am

The US Department of State recently discovered a document proving
that over 1934 the Turkish government continued its genocide policy
towards the Armenian population.

In a letter sent from the US Embassy in Ankara, Ambassador Robert
P. Skinner summarizes the way in which the Turkish government
constrained the remaining Armenians living in Anatolia, to give up
their properties before being exiled from their hearths, independent
correspondent Jean Eckian informed.

Robert P. Skinner indicates that: "It is probable, that their expulsion
is quite simply a step moreover of the Turkish government in its
policy stated to make of Anatolia a space purely inhabited by Turks."

Moreover, the dating of this letter shows that the crime committed
against the Armenians is not something which can simply be relegated
to the Ottoman time.

The full text of Ambassador Robert P. Skinner's letter, dated March 2,
1934, is presented below:

"I have the honor to bring to the Department's attention such details
as have reached the Embassy from several sources concerning the recent
deportations of Armenians from the interior of Anatolia to Istanbul.

The deportees began to arrive at Istanbul some six weeks ago and
they are quartered by the Armenian Church and its auxiliary relief
organizations in Churches, school houses and abandoned buildings in
the villages of OtekÃ¶y and YenikÃ¶y. About 600 Armenians are now being
taken care of. They are from various towns and villages of Anatolia.

It is assumed by most of the deportees that their expulsion from
their homes in Anatolia is a part of the Government's program of
making Anatolia a pure Turkish district.

They relate that the Turkish police, in towns and villages where
Armenians lived, attempted to instigate local Moslem people to drive
the Armenians away. These efforts failed completely. The authorities
then brought in Turks from Rumeli and intimated to them that they
could take over the Armenian possessions. This new element, however,
instead of taking a hostile attitude toward the Armenians became
most congenial with them. These two means failing, the Armenians
were told that they had to leave at once for Istanbul. They sold
their possessions receiving for them ruinous price. I have been told
that cattle worth several hundred liras a head had been sold for as
little as five liras a head. My informant stated that the Armenians
were permitted to sell their property in order that no one of them
could say that they were forced to abandon it. However, the sale
under these conditions amounted to a practical abandonment.

The Armenians were obliged to walk from their villages to the
railways and then they were shipped by train to Istanbul. Local relief
organizations are doing their best to attempt to find employment is
found. However, the size of the task is staggering. Local sympathetic
people have been canvassed to contribute money for their relief.

The real reasons for the deportations are unknown. A few Armenians
believe that it is due to their superior business methods which
arouses jealousy among certain Turkish elements. The Armenians are
know for their energy and thoroughness in business and many of them
believe that they suffering now for these qualities. It is likely,
though, that their removal is simply one step in the government's
avowed policy of making Anatolia purely Turkish."

Corpses of Armenian children left in gutter - Photo Collection of Armin Wegner

2008-10-30T16:06:00.005-04:00

Photo Collection of Armin T. Wegner
Caption: "Abandoned and murdered small children of the (Armenian) deportees, "according to the photographer, 1915-1916. Three are dead including stripped boy in gutter. Location: Ottoman empire, region Syria.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What are your thoughts when you look at this picture?

When I see that man walking away in a suit, shows how indifferent a human being can be to the sufferings of others.
Children are dying and some already dead he walks away.

These children parents are murdered in the hands of Turks because they were Armenians. Now they are orphans.

Indifference is one of the greatest sins.

The Bible tells us:

James 2:13 "For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy"

MEMORIES OF EYEWITNESS-SURVIVORS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

2008-10-30T10:09:00.002-04:00

As a result of the Genocide of the Armenians in 1915, the deportation from Cilicia (1921) and the disaster of Izmir (1922), more than 1.5 million Western Armenians were exterminated in the hands of Turks, while those who were rescued and miraculously survived, remained homeless and deprived of their motherland; they were forced to migrate and to settle in different countries of the world, creating the Armenian Diaspora as a historical reality.

I would like to warn you, after reading these testimonies you might "lose" your mind thinking how a human being can do such a cruel thing to another human being.

MEMORIES OF EYEWITNESS-SURVIVORS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

About The Turkish Denial

2008-10-27T15:20:00.001-04:00

Research on the Armenian Genocide has experienced a remarkable growth in recent years. Survivors' memoirs, editions of diplomatic documents, eyewitness accounts by missionaries and others, case studies, and monographic research on various aspects of the Genocide provide informed insights into the nature of the crime.

A considerable number of the available studies on the subject have involved the denial of this genocide. Deniers allege that the Ottoman government never persecuted systematically or attempted to exterminate the empire's Armenian population. On the contrary, one is asked to believe that it was the Armenians who killed a substantial part of the Muslim population in what is presented as a "civil war". Moreover Armenians are blamed for having started this civil war in order to assist the Russian army's advance on the Eastern front and to bring down the Ottoman government. Deniers maintain that relatively few Armenians died in connection with what they claim to have been a legitimate act of Ottoman government self-defense.

Denial of genocide is not unique to the Armenian case. As with other crimes, perpetrators try to avoid punishment by obstructing investigation and research. Those engaged in denial employ a multitude of techniques. These methods cover a wide range of activities, from simply ignoring the established historical record to the intimidation of scholars.

Denial of both the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide was initiated by the perpetrators immediately upon commencement of the extermination of their targeted victims. However, denial of the Armenian Genocide differs significantly from that of the Holocaust. Whereas the Nazi Germans were permanently crippled by their defeat in World War II, the Ottoman government was able to reorganize itself following defeat. With slightly altered personnel, the government that had been the "Committee of Union and Progress" (CUP), which was responsible for the Armenian Genocide, was able to reemerge by way of the nationalist movement, ostensibly led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Thus, the CUP cadres managed to keep control to Turkish politics for many years to come and were able to perpetuate their denial propaganda as the official Turkish historical thesis on the Armenian Genocide. This denial was, and today still is, formulated in official Turkish government publications and distributed worldwide.

Hilmar Kaiser
German research scholar and historian from
the European University Institute in Florence, Italy

U.S. DOCUMENT REVEALS TURKEY CONTINUED OTTOMAN EMPIRE’S ANTI-ARMENIAN POLICIES

2008-10-25T23:12:00.001-04:00

Those who want to shield today’s Turkey from responsibility for the Armenian Genocide have sought to blame the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire rather than the Republic of Turkey which was not established until 1923.

One wonders then why Turkish officials, who have tried every trick to deny the facts of the Armenian Genocide, have not taken the easy way out by shifting the blame for the Genocide to the long defunct Ottoman Empire.

A frequently advanced explanation is that Turks, as a proud people, cannot accept that their ancestors committed the heinous crime of seeking to eliminate an entire nation. Others have argued that should the Republic of Turkey blame the Ottomans for the Armenian Genocide, it could be held legally liable as the successor state to the Ottoman Empire.

In recent years, however, it has become clear, particularly through the painstaking research conducted by Turkish scholar Taner Akcam, that a key reason why today’s Turkish officials are not prepared to face their history honestly and blame their Ottoman ancestors is that the Republic of Turkey is actually the continuation of the Ottoman state. Indeed, many of the early leaders of the Turkish Republic had been high-ranking Ottoman officials personally involved in the implementation of the Armenian Genocide. Such an unbroken transition in leadership assured the continuity of the Ottomans’ anti-Armenian policies.

In retrospect, it has become apparent that these genocidal policies stretched over a half century, starting with Sultan Abdul Hamid’s massacre of 300,000 Armenians in 1894-96, followed by the killings of 30,000 Armenians in Adana by the Young Turk regime in 1909, culminating in the Genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-23, and the subsequent policies of forced Turkification and deportation of tens of thousands of Armenians by the Republic of Turkey.

An important document from the U.S. archives, known until now to a handful of scholars, was recently posted on an Armenian/Turkish website. It provides incontestable evidence that Armenians continued to be uprooted from their native lands and deported by the Republic of Turkey well into the 1930’s for purely racial reasons.

The document in question is a "Strictly Confidential" cable dated March 2, 1934, sent by U.S. Ambassador Robert P. Skinner from Ankara to the Secretary of State in Washington, reporting the deportation of 600 Armenians from "the interior of Anatolia to Istanbul."

The Ambassador wrote: "It is assumed by most of the deportees that their expulsion from their homes in Anatolia is a part of the Government’s program of making Anatolia a pure Turkish district. They relate that the Turkish police, in towns and villages where Armenians lived, attempted to instigate local Moslem people to drive the Armenians away. … The Armenians were told that they had to leave at once for Istanbul. They sold their possessions receiving for them ruinous prices. I have been told that cattle worth several hundred liras a head had been sold for as little as five liras a head. My informant stated that the Armenians were permitted to sell their property in order that no one of them could say that they were forced to abandon it. However, the sale under these conditions amounted to a practical abandonment." Sass

The Ambassador further reported: "The Armenians were obliged to walk from their villages to the railways and then they were shipped by train to Istanbul. … The real reason for the deportations is unknown…. It is likely, though, that their removal is simply one step in the government’s avowed policy of making Anatolia purely Turkish."

Top be sure, in the 1920’s and 30’s thousands of Armenian survivors of the Genocide were forced out from their homes in Anatolia to other locations in Turkey or neighboring countries. These racist policies were followed in the 1940’s by Varlik Vergisi, the imposition of exorbitant wealth taxes on Armenians, Greeks and Jews, and the 1955 Istanbul pogroms during which many Greeks and some Armenians and Jews were killed and their properties destroyed.

This barbaric continuum of massacre, genocide and deportation highlights the existence of a long-term stratagem implemented by successive Turkish regimes from the 1890’s to recent times in order to solve the Armenian Question with finality.

Consequently, the Republic of Turkey is legally responsible for its own crimes as well as those committed by its Ottoman predecessors.

By Harut Sassounian, Publisher, The California Courier

Turkey scared to admit Armenian genocide, says historian

2008-10-14T12:04:00.003-04:00

Robert Tait in Yerevan
The Guardian,
Monday September 22 2008

Members of the Armenian community join a demonstration march in London in 2005. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA

Turkey risks a collapse of its secular political system akin to that of the Soviet Union if it bows to international pressure to recognise the 1915-22 Armenian genocide, the head of Armenia's state memorial to the event has told the Guardian.

Hayk Demoyan said Ankara could not acknowledge the systematic killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman troops during the first world war because it would lead to a wholesale re-writing of history and undermine the ideological basis of the Turkish state.

In remarks that will cast a shadow over attempts to forge a new Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, he said those implicated included Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey and a figure Turks are taught to revere. Historical documents proved Atatürk committed "war crimes" against Armenians and other groups in his drive to create an ethnically homogeneous Turkish state, Demoyan insisted. "Fear of rewriting history is the main fear of modern Turkey," said Demoyan, director of The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia's capital.

"It is a fear of facing historical reality and causing a total collapse of the ideological axis that modern republican Turkey was formed around. Turks get panicked when you compare Atatürk's legacy to Lenin.

Atatürk was sentenced to death in absentia by a military judge to punish war crimes during the first world war. There are documents from non-Armenian sources listing him as a war criminal ."

Demoyan's remarks come amid fledgling attempts to re-establish links between two countries which have not had diplomatic relations since 1994, following a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Turkey's ally.

Tentative efforts towards normalising ties occurred this month when the Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, visited Yerevan to attend a World Cup football match between Turkey and Armenia at the invitation of his Armenian counterpart, Serge Sarkisian.

Unlike most visiting heads of state, Gül did not visit the genocide museum, which displays documentary and photographic exhibits proving, Armenian officials say, that their ethnic brethren were subjected to deliberate genocide. Turkey vehemently denies this and has jailed Turkish citizens who argued otherwise. However, rising numbers of Turkish tourists and journalists have visited the museum recently.

"More than 500 Turks have visited this year. They've come in unprecedented numbers," Demoyan said. "Their reaction is one of shock. At first there is denial. Sometimes they ask: 'What is our sin?' or 'How can we be responsible for this?'. It's not taught in Turkish schools, so we understand their reaction."

Turkey claims the Armenian death toll has been exaggerated and that most victims died from starvation or disease. It also argues that many Turks were killed by Armenian groups.

126 Holocaust Scholars Affirm The Incontestable Fact Of The Armenian Genocide And Urge Western Democracies To Officially Recognise It As Such

2008-10-09T11:45:00.002-04:00

Statement by 126 Holocaust Scholars, Holders of Academic Chairs, and Directors of Holocaust Research and Studies Centers – March 7th, 2000

At the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Scholar’s Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches Convening at St. Joseph University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 3-7, 2000, one hundred and twenty-six Holocaust Scholars, holders of Academic Chairs and Directors of Holocaust Research and Studies Centers, participants of the Conference, signed a statement affirming that the World War I Armenian Genocide is an incontestable historical fact and accordingly urge the governments of Western democracies to likewise recognize it as such.

The petitioners, among whom is Nobel Laureate for Peace Elie Wiesel, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, also asked the Western Democracies to urge the Government and Parliament of Turkey to finally come to terms with a dark chapter of Ottoman-Turkish history and to recognize the Armenian Genocide. This would provide an invaluable impetus to the process of the democratization of Turkey.

Below is a partial list of the signatories:

Prof. Yehuda Bauer – Distinguished Professor, Hebrew University; Director, The International Institute of Holocaust Research,Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Prof. Israel Charny, Director – Institute of the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem; Professor at the Hebrew University; Editor-in-Chief of The

Encyclopedia of Genocide

Prof. Ward Churchill – Ethnic Studies, The University of Colorado, Boulder

Prof. Stephen Feinstein – Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

Prof. Saul Friedman – Director, Holocaust and Jewish Studies, Youngston State University, Ohio

Prof. Edward Gaffney – Valparaiso University Law School

Prof. Zev Garber – Los Angeles Valley College

Prof. Dorota Glowacka – University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Dr. Irving Greenberg, – President, Jewish Life Network

Prof. Herbert Hirsch – Virginia Commonwealth University

Prof. Irving L. Horowitz – Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University, NJ

Rabbi Dr. Steve Jacobs – Temple Sinai Shalom, Huntsville, Alabama; Associate Editor of The Encyclopedia of Genocide

Prof. Steven Katz – Distinguish Professor, Director, Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University

Prof. Richard Libowitz – Temple University

Dr. Elizabeth Maxwell – Executive Director of the International Scholarly, Conference on the Holocaust, London, England

Prof. Erik Markusen – Southwest State University, MN

Prof. Saul Mendlowitz – Dag Hammerskjold Distinguished Professor of International Law, Rutgers University

Prof. Jack Needle – Director, Center for Holocaust Studies, Brookdale Community College, Lincroft, NJ

Dr. Philip Rosen – Director, Holocaust Education Center of the Delaware Valley

Prof. Alan S, Rosenbaum – Dept. of Philosophy, Cleveland State University

William L. Shulman – President, Association of Holocaust Organizations City University of New York

Prof. Samuel Totten – The University of Arkansas; Assoc. Editor of The Encyclopedia of Genocide

Prof. Elie Wiesel – Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Boston University; Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial

Council; Nobel Laureate for Peace

I hereby declare that the originals of these one hundred and twenty-six signatories are on file in my office. All affiliations supplied are for identification purposes only.

Dr. Stephen Feinstein,

Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

A landmark Armenian-Kurdish Conference held in the UK parliament.

2008-07-14T12:35:00.000-04:00

PRESS RELEASE
Armenian Solidarity with the Victims of all Genocides
Centre of Halabja against the Anfalization and Genocide of Kurdish People
Seyfo Centre
c/o The Temple of Peace, Cardiff, Wales  07718982732

A landmark Armenian-Kurdish Conference held in the UK parliament.
Establishment of a permanent Kurdish-Armenian dialogue

This week marked a development in Armeno-Kurdish relations with a major
Conference held in the UK parliament. Nearly all  of the UK Kurdish
organisations were represented.
   On tuesday, in the House of Commons, Prof Kamal Mazhar Ahmad, former
Professor of history at Baghdad University gave a presentatiion based on
his book on the Kurds in World War 1 and the Armenian Genocide. He had
quoted from witnessess such as Faez Al-Ghosain who was in Turkey at the
time of the Genocide.  He maintained that the killings were premeditated
by the Turkish state, rather than being  outbursts of violence at local
level. His presentation (delivered in Arabic and translated) was well
received and several Kurds in  the audience rose at the end to say that
Kurds should apologise for the involvement of many of them in the
Genocide. Several expressed their desire to become involved in the work
for Recognition of this Genocide .
   It was decided unanimously, at the suggestion of Adnan Kochar,
director of CHAK, that we should  write to the KRG government to ask for
official recognition of the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians and the
Assyrians, and also to the Armenian Government to ask for official
recognition of the Anfal Genocide
   The other speaker, eminent  Kurdish writer Rebwar Fatah concentrated
on issues of Human Rights related to Genocide.

   On wednesday in the House of Lords, the issue of the betrayal of
Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians by the Great Powers in the Treaty of
Lausanne was addressed (close to its 85th anniversary). The speakers
were researcher  Tony Kahve, writer Dr Kemal Miredali and researcher Ms
Soma Mallzada. The legitimacy of the Lausanne Treaty was challanged and
questioned from the perspective of the three nations which were not
allowed to participate in its creation.It was noted that Turkey has
continually broken the terms of the treaty, rendering it even more
invalid. The speeches will be ready for distribution soon.
   One valuable contribution was sent to the Conference by Haydar Issik
a Kurdish writer now in Germany. (below)

THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS IN TURKEY

BY HAYDAR ISIK (trans. Tony Kahve)

Ladies and Gentlemen,

   I greet you sincerely and would like to begin by an extract from
David Kherdian's book called "In the Shadow of the Crescent." It was
published in Germany by the Peri publishing house. It reads as follows:

"Even if we are divided by force, we still remain one family. If one of
us dies, undoubtedly something dies in all of us. But if only one of us
survives then we will all live through that survivor. No happiness
emanates from disaster. What the Turk does is insanity. You may get
serenity one day followed by disaster the next.

We must wait and see as to which gate God will reveal to us.

I hope that the avenue which is about to open in front of us will also
bring us back. Whatever happens you must return."

   These are the words of a grandmother of a large and prosperous
Armenian family in the Anatolian town of Afyon, before she was deported
to the Syrian desert.

Firstly, the young men were conscripted into the army, shortly after the
deportations begun.

   At this point, I would like to note that the only survivor of the
family in the desert town of Deir Zor was a child called Veron. Indeed,
under these circumstances, even if he could return to Afyon, there was
no longer any one there to greet him. The land of Anatolia and the
Syrian deserts became the grave of 1.5 million Armenians. Incredibly,
even their graves could not be in their motherland. Their remains merely
gained the attention of scavenging animals. This is the greatest
humanitarian crime committed against the Armenian nation during the
first quarter of the twentieth century. It is a Genocide. Consequently,
the mass barbarism must be seriously questioned. The responsible element
must face its history. Bypassing the issue is sanctioning Genocide, thus
opening the gates of new Genocides. Claiming that we committed no such
crime and that they committed such crimes against us does not hide the
reality.

   Anatolia's ancient people have felt the death of 1.5 million
Armenians, thus something has also died within those Turks and Kurds who
consider themselves human beings. Anatolia was a land populated with
Armenians at every sunrise, with them it was a beautiful land. Where are
our Armenian neighbours today? Why can't these ancient people of
Anatolia return to their country? Why shouldn't the present day sunrise
greet them as it used to? Previously, despite religious differences, the
Turk, the Armenian, the Assyrian and the Syrian as well as the Kurd were
one family. The Armenian man was enriching Anatolia with art and
culture. You have to think for a moment that if this Genocide had not
taken place couldn't all Anatolians still pursue a prosperous life
jointly? Doesn't the answer to this question reflect the words of the
old women that: "What the Turk does is insanity"? Indeed if this
insanity had not been committed the peoples of Anatolia today would
still have coexisted prosperously.

   The Armenian people were the true owners of certain regions of
Anatolia and were the true wealth of those regions. What did the
destroyers of this wealth truly gain in their single-minded disease
incorporating a frenzy of Pan Islam and racist Pan-Turkism? The reality
is that now they are unable to wipe away the Armenian blood which stains
their foreheads permanently. Now, which ever door Turkey knocks on there
appears the Armenian Genocide.

   The Kurds also became the triggers and revolvers of this genocide. I
never forget the statement made in 1956 by a Muslim called Sofu Hasan
from the town of Mush. "We were told that the Armenians were to attack
the mosque. We, however, acted rapidly and quickly gathered them. I know
that I killed five Armenians with one bullet".

   Sofu Hasan believed he was conducting the orders of former Caliphs.
He would pray profoundly for the day when he would be received by God.
The important point to comprehend here is that the spirit of Sofu Hasan
has now entered the AKP the ruling party in Turkey. AKP believes that it
has inherited the Ottoman past, and does not recognise the Genocide,
this means that it is sanctioning it.

   During the late nineteenth century, 36 Kurdish clans were organised
into special brigades by Sultan Abdul Hamid in order to eliminate the
Armenians. Thus the Kurds became the instruments of that government.
Today, however, 75 members of the Grand National/Assembly fortified with
a number of ministers have become the triggers against the Kurds. The
Kurdish brigades of the past are the shame of the Kurdish people.

   One Armenian survivor of the Genocide describes his experience as
such: "Our deportation column gradually got smaller, partly because
numerous children were killed or kidnapped. One night we were
approaching a caravanserai, fifteen of the surviving children rushed to
a well next to the buildings in order to drink water. The officer in
charge believed that their true intention was to escape. Consequently,
two gendarmes were sent after them. They were promptly put in a line and
shot. They were between 8 and 12 years old.(Erlebnisse, Therese Lehmann
Haupt p8  Donat & Temman Veslag)

   Unfortunately, the nature of these events is most heart breaking.
Sadly, even today we live in a state that the Turkish police, in front
of the TV cameras, will break the arm of a child and viciously beat
women and children. The Turkish soldier will happily decimate the bodies
of the guerrillas he has killed. Such violence demonstrates once again
the murderous continuity emanating from the Committee of Union and
Progress and its extension the Kemalist regime.

   This ideology [based on Turkism] incorporates cultural elimination,
thus Armenians are unable to survive in Anatolia. Murder of Hrant Dink
was also committed by the same insane psyche. The same insanity is now
attempting to eliminate the Kurds. AKP and its generals have spread
their war throughout Kurdistan. The Turkish regime is racist and
ideologically lives in the past. Turkey must apologise to the Armenians
and promote the principles of peace and equality with the Kurds;
otherwise it cannot survive by a policy of permanent murder. Turkish
politicians should get on their knees at the Genocide Monument in
Yerevan and ask for forgiveness. Just as Willy Brandt did in Warsaw for
the Second World War crimes.

   What has happened to the Armenians should never be forgotten.
Anatolian people must be told the truth. Personally I have been
threatened numerous times due to the articles I have written about the
Armenians. But as a human being it is my duty to acknowledge the
Armenian Genocide. At every opportunity, I present articles and continue
to make speeches. Thus, I convey my support to the Armenian people and
wish them all the success

The Armenian Genocide in History

2008-06-04T22:19:00.002-04:00

The Armenian Genocide in History

For decades before they were the victims of genocide, Armenians living as a Christian minority in the Muslim-dominated Ottoman Empire were accorded second-class citizenship. It was against the law for them to carry weapons or ride horses. Their houses could not overlook those of Muslims. Testimony from Armenians was not admissible in courts of law — just as slaves and even freedmen in the 19th-century American South were barred from testifying against whites.

This official state discrimination opened the door to massive violence preceding the ultimate genocide. Between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were massacred in 1895. Another 15,000 to 30,000 were killed on a single day in 1909. When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I in 1914 on the side of Central Powers, its military and political leaders feared the oppressed Armenians would form a fifth column and collaborate with the Russians, who were pressing hard at the collapsing empire's eastern edges. There is strong evidence that some Armenian men of fighting age did in fact take up arms against Turkish troops, fighting as pro-Russian guerrillas.

Armenian men enlisted in the Turkish army were disarmed and reassigned to labor battalions, and widespread propaganda began depicting Armenians as a collective threat to national security. On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government imprisoned around 250 Armenian intellectuals and leaders. This marked the beginning of the genocide, which eventually resulted in the deaths of between 1 million and 1.5 million people. During the next six months, by government order, more than a million Armenians were forcibly deported and marched through the desert into Syria with little or no food, water or shelter. Others were herded into concentration camps and drowned, poisoned, burned to death or shot.

The documentary evidence of the genocide includes a 1915 telegram to a Turkish provincial official from Behaeddin Shakir, one of the leaders of the secret organization created to plan and carry out the genocide, which included death squads staffed by criminals released from prison for that purpose. "Are the Armenians, who are being dispatched from there, being liquidated?" Shakir wrote. "Are those harmful persons being exterminated, or are they merely being dispatched and exiled? Answer explicitly."

Eyewitnesses to the genocide included Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time. "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were simply giving the death warrant to a whole race," he said. "They understood this well, and in their conversations they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."

— David Holthouse

Intelligence Report
Summer 2008

State of Denial

2008-06-04T22:13:00.001-04:00

Turkey Spends Millions to Cover Up Armenian Genocide

By David Holthouse
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=935

Intelligence Report
Summer 2008

Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.

The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide.

Turkish president Abdullah Gul warns of severe repercussions to the relations between the United States and Turkey if the "Armenian allegations are accepted."

Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.

Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at Harvard University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian death toll to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important to bear in mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even ineptness that had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder.

"Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows no signs of resolution."

But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and there is no real debate about its essential details, according to the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to rewrite history.

"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide — hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades — is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government.

"The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens — an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."

Double Killing
Despite this clear consensus of experts, Turkey exerts political leverage and spends millions of dollars in the United States to obfuscate the Armenian genocide, with alarming success even at the highest levels of government. Lobbyists on the Turkish payroll stymied a Congressional resolution commemorating the genocide last fall by convincing lawmakers to reverse their stated positions. Even President Bush flip-flopped.

Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide and are paid by the Turkish government provided the politicians with the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing to dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government's present-day interests.

"This all happened a long time ago, and I don't know if we can know whether it was a massacre or a genocide or what," said U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) after changing his vote.

"The last thing Congress should be doing is deciding the history of an empire [the Ottoman empire] that doesn't even exist any more," said President Bush.

But experts in genocide saw things quite differently.

"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world."

Last year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.

He was hardly the first. As long ago as 1943, law professor Raphael Lemkin, who would later serve as an advisor to Nuremburg chief counsel Robert Jackson, coined the term "genocide" with the Armenians in mind.

Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke this April at a United States Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide — a ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter was shot down.

"The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives and senators.

Infiltrating the Academy
Efforts to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide began while carrion birds were still picking over corpses in their desert boneyards, with Turkey issuing a first official statement assuring the world at large that no atrocities had occurred. Turkey's primary strategy for denying the Armenian genocide since then has shifted from blanket denial to disputing the death toll to blaming the massacres on Kurdish bandits and a few rogue officials to claiming the Armenians who died were enemy combatants in a civil war.

Turkish ambassador Nuzhet Kandemir

Turkey began intervening in the U.S. on behalf of denying the genocide in the 1930s, when Turkish leaders convinced the U.S. State Department to prevent MGM studios from making a movie based on the book The Forty Days of the Musa Dagh because it depicted aspects of the Armenian genocide.

In 1982, the government of Turkey donated $3 million to create the Institute for Turkish Studies, a nonprofit organization housed at Georgetown University that pushes a pro-Turkey agenda, including denial of the Armenian genocide. Three years later, in 1985, Turkey bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Times to publish a letter questioning the Armenian genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had received funding that year from the Institute for Turkish Studies or another of Turkey's surrogates like the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, a quasi-governmental agency in Turkey's capital city.

The Institute for Turkish Studies has since received sizable donations from American defense contractors that sell arms to Turkey, including General Dynamics and Westinghouse. Turkey continues to provide an annual subsidy to support the institute. In 2006, the most recent year for which tax records are available, the institute awarded $85,000 in grants to scholars. Its chairman is the current Turkish ambassador to the U.S., Nabi Sensoy.

Robert Jay Lifton

The first unassailable evidence of the extent of the Armenian genocide denial industry's reach in academic circles arrived in 1990 in an envelope addressed to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and John Jay College. It contained a letter signed by Nuzhet Kandemir, who was then Turkey's ambassador to the United States, protesting Lifton's inclusion of several passing references to the Armenian genocide in his prize-winning book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.

"It is particularly disturbing to see a major scholar on the holocaust, a tragedy whose enormity and barbarity must never be forgotten, so careless in his references to a field outside his own area of expertise," Kandemir wrote. "To compare a tragic civil war perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists, and the human suffering it wrought on both Muslim and Christian populations, with the horrors of a premeditated attempt to systematically eradicate a people is, to anyone familiar with the history in question, simply ludicrous."

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Kandemir's letter. Academics who write about the Armenian genocide were then and still are routinely castigated by Turkish authorities.

What Lifton found intriguing, however, was a second letter in the envelope, which the Turkish ambassador had included quite by accident. It was a memo to Kandemir from Near East historian Heath Lowry, in which Lowry provided Kandemir with a point-by-point cheat sheet on how to attack Lifton's book, which Lowry chummily referred to as "our problem."

Lowry at the time was the founding director of the Institute for Turkish Studies. He resigned that position in 1996 when he was selected from a field of 20 candidates to fill the Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies at Princeton University, a new position in the Near Eastern Studies department that was created with a $750,000 matching grant from the government of Turkey.

Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Lowry had never held a full-time teaching position and had not published a single work of scholarship through a major publishing house. As a result of that and of what The Boston Globe described in 1995 as his work as "a long-time lobbyist for the Turkish government," his appointment sparked a firestorm of controversy. A protest group called Princeton Alumni for Credibility published a petition decrying Lowry's appointment that was signed by more than 80 leading scholars and writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Joyce Carol Oates and many historians and experts in genocide.

Peter Balakian, the director of Colgate University's Center for the Study of Ethics and World Societies and the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, called Lowry "a propagandist for a foreign government."

Speaking at a 2005 symposium at Princeton commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Balakian posed a rhetorical question: "Would a university want someone who worked with a neo-Nazi group to cover up the Holocaust on their faculty?"

The relationship of Turkey to U.S. scholars promoting Armenian genocide denial is similar to that of the oil industry to fringe climatologists who dispute the reality of global warming. The cause and effect relationship is murky. It's impossible to know for sure if they're making the claims to get the money or getting the money because they make the claims. And many of those who receive money from the Institute of Turkish Studies do little or nothing to support the government's version of what happened to its Armenian minority.

But a number of them certainly seem to, including Justin A. McCarthy, a professor of history at the University of Louisville. McCarthy claims that death tolls attributed to what he calls "this imaginary Turkish plan" are grossly exaggerated and resulted from justifiable wartime self-defense actions triggered by traitorous Armenians conspiring with Turkey's enemies.

McCarthy also points out that Armenians massacred Turks on at least one occasion before the "so-called Armenian genocide." In other words, they had it coming. "The question of who started the conflicts is important, both historically and morally important," McCarthy declared in a 2005 speech before the Turkish Grand National Assembly. "In more than 100 years of warfare, Turks and Armenians killed each other. The question of who began the killing must be understood, because it is seldom justifiable to be the aggressor, but is always justifiable to defend yourself."

He continued: "If those who defend themselves go beyond defense and exact revenge, as always happens in war, they should be identified and criticized. But those who should be most blamed are those who began the wars, those who committed the first evil deeds, and those who caused the bloodshed. Those who began the conflict were the Armenian nationalists, the Armenian revolutionaries. The guilt is on their heads."

Enforcing the Turkish View

Hrant Dink (Corbis)

In France and Switzerland, it's a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. In Turkey, it's a crime to affirm it.

Enacted in 2005, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it illegal for any citizen or resident of Turkey to give credence to the Armenian genocide. Numerous journalists and scholars have been prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness" under that statute, beginning with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who was charged for stating, "A million Armenians were killed in these lands." Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was prosecuted three times for criticizing the Turkish government's longstanding policy of denying the Armenian genocide.

Where the law failed to silence Dink, bullets succeeded. He was gunned down in front of his central Istanbul office last January by a Turkish ultranationalist. Footage and photos later surfaced of the assassin celebrating in front of a Turkish flag with grinning policemen.

The assassination last year of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink (above), an outspoken critic of Armenian genocide denial, sparked protests throughout Turkey. (Corbis)

Dink's friend and ideological ally Tanner Ackam, a distinguished Turkish historian and sociologist on the faculty of the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, attended Dink's funeral in Turkey, despite the considerable risk to his own life. Ackam, a leading international authority on the Armenian genocide, was marked for death by Turkish ultranationalists following the November 2006 publication of his book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and The Question of Turkish Responsibility. The book is a definitive history based in large part on official documents from Turkish government archives.

"It would be better for world peace and truth if sewer germs like you were taken off the planet," went one of the dozens of anonymous threats Ackam continues to receive in Minnesota. "Pray that the devil takes you away soon because otherwise you'll be living a hell on earth. … Who am I? You're going to find out, Tanner, you're going to find out."

Turkish ultranationalists have, in effect, targeted many other people who, like Ackam, affirm the genocide. Several of their websites include home addresses, phone numbers and photos of these scholars.

Genocide deniers often disrupt Ackam's lectures. In November 2006, a gang of Turkish ultranationalists attacked him at a book signing at City University of New York.

"Denial of the Armenian genocide has developed over the decades to become a complex and far-reaching machine that rivals the Nazi Germany propaganda ministry," says Ackam. "This machine runs on academic dishonesty, fabricated information, political pressure, intimidation and threats, all funded or supported, directly or indirectly, by the Turkish state. It has become a huge industry."

Convincing Congress
Academia is one of two major American fronts in Turkey's campaign to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide. The other is Congress.

As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call the U.S. and Israel its allies, Turkey wields significant political influence that it uses to prevent the U.S. from joining 22 other nations in officially recognizing the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.

In 1989, the U.S. State Department released archived eyewitness accounts that, according to State Department officials, showed that "thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered." That same year, a bill commemorating the genocide was introduced in the U.S. Senate. But Turkey responded by blocking U.S. Navy ships from entering strategically important Turkish waters and by declaring a ban on all U.S. military training operations on Turkish territory. The bill quickly evaporated.

Richard Gephardt

Last September, the matter came up again. The U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee voted to bring a nonbinding resolution to the floor of Congress condemning the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, placing the death toll at 1.5 million, and labeling the killing a "genocide."

This time, Turkey responded by recalling its ambassador to the United States and forecasting dire repercussions. "In the case that Armenian allegations are accepted, there will be problems in the relations between the two countries," warned Turkish President Abdullah Gul.

"Yesterday, some in Congress wanted to play hardball," said Egmen Bagis, foreign policy advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "I can assure you, Turkey knows how to play hardball."

The next day, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack apologized to Turkey on behalf of the United States by issuing a statement expressing "regret" for the committee's actions, which, he cautioned, "may do grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations and to U.S. interests in Europe and the Middle East."

Bob Livingston

Defense Secretary Robert Gates added his opposition to the resolution and pointed out that 70% of the air cargo sent to U.S. forces in Iraq and 30% of the fuel consumed by those forces is delivered via Turkey. President Bush, perhaps forgetting his campaign promise in 2000 to push for official recognition of the Armenian genocide if elected president, also came out against the resolution.

While Turkish officials made threats, lobbyists paid by Turkey delivered money to congressmen in the form of campaign and political action committee donations. Louisiana representative Bobby Jindal (a Republican who's now Louisiana's governor) and Mississippi representative Roger Wicker (now a Republican senator representing that state) both dropped their sponsorship of the resolution and began speaking against it — but only after receiving around $20,000 each from former congressmen Bob Livingston, a Republican, and Richard Gephardt, a Democrat, who now work for lobbying firms contracted by Turkey to oppose any recognition of the Armenian genocide.

In 2000, while still in office, Gephardt had declared that he was "committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the Armenian genocide." In 2003, he co-sponsored a resolution placing "the Armenian genocide" in the company of the World War II Holocaust and mass deaths in Cambodia and Rwanda that was voted down after a Turkish lobbying blitzkrieg.

Since leaving office and accepting a $1.2 million-a-year contract to lobby for Turkey, the former House majority leader has experienced a profound change of heart. "Alienating Turkey through the passage of the resolution could undermine our efforts to promote stability in the theater of [Middle East] operations, if not exacerbate the situation further," he wrote in an E-mail to the International Herald Tribune. Last fall, as part of his efforts to help torpedo the symbolic Armenian genocide resolution, Gephardt escorted Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy to meetings with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders.

Bob Livingston, whose firm has been paid more than $12 million by the Turkish government since 1999, also pitched in. As part of the lobbying effort last fall that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the sponsors of the resolution, called "the most intense I've ever seen," Livingston shepherded Turkish dignitaries from office to office on Capitol Hill.

As another part of that campaign, the government of Turkey took out full-page advertisements in major American newspapers calling upon the members of Congress to "support efforts to examine history, not legislate it." The ads featured a testimonial from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice — "These historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober look from historians" — that implied that historians have yet to seriously study the Armenian genocide.

More than 100 supporters of the resolution reversed their positions, and H.R. 106 was voted down.

The government of Turkey has since continued to call for a "historian's commission" of scholars to "study the facts of what happened in 1915-1923." The proposed committee is marketed as a high-minded quest for truth and reconciliation, a long overdue arbitration of disputed history, and a chance to finally give equal weight to both sides of the story.

But as the saying goes, a lie isn't the other side of any story. It's just a lie.

"When it comes to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide, there is no 'Armenian' or 'Turkish' side of the question, any more than there is a 'Jewish' or 'German' side of the historical reality of the Holocaust," writes Torben Jorgensen, of the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "There is a scientific side and an unscientific side — acknowledgement or denial."

Armenia's 'Christian holocaust'

2008-04-28T08:11:00.000-04:00

DAVID SMITH , THE JERUSALEM POST

Apr. 24, 2008

In late August 1939, the day before his invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler gathered his commanders at his home and informed them he had placed "death's head" military formations in the east with orders "to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women and children of Polish derivation and language."

He assured his commanders the world would not long condemn them, justifying his brutality by asking rhetorically, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Hitler was referring to the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces beginning in April 1915. Until today, the Turkish government denies the authenticity of both Hitler's statement and the genocide itself.

Tel Aviv University professor Israel Charny, chief editor of the Encyclopedia of Genocide, insists the statement was recorded by "an indisputably serious" Associated Press correspondent, and that other remarks were made by Hitler that "confirm that the Armenian genocide was an active guiding concept in the monster's mind."

Kevork Kahvedjian, son of Jerusalem photographer and Armenian genocide survivor Elia Kahvedjian, explains his father was personal testimony to the genocide and its savagery. "When it started, he was only five years old, but he remembered it very clearly. Especially the last year of his life he remembered it..." Kevork continually slipped into the first person while recounting his father's story, as if it had happened to him: "I used to see lots of dead people, piles of them. Some had been burned. Until today I remember the smell of burned flesh," he narrated, detailing the death march through the desert.

He remembered the sound of the German cannons pounding the city, then a lull of about a month before the Turkish soldiers entered his home and took Elia, his mother, a sister and two brothers - one brother was just a few months old. Two older brothers had already been hanged.

"Soldiers came and started pushing my mother. She tried to go back to the house but the soldiers hit her with rifle butts and she had to take the children and start walking." The Armenians were allowed only what they could carry. They walked for weeks through the desert of Deir Zor with soldiers on both sides. The soldiers offered neither food nor water, but the prisoners ate some plants and drank brackish water on the way.

After weeks of carrying her six-month-old baby, Elia's mother, exhausted, set the infant in the shade of a tree and abandoned him, hoping some kind person would find him. The older sister, about 12 years old during the march, was abducted. Elia found her 18 years later and discovered she had been forced to serve in a harem.

In a wadi, near the end of the trek, "I heard my mother say, 'Today, I think they're going to kill us.'" It happened that that a Kurd was passing by. She called the Kurd and told him, "Take this boy and go." The Kurd took Elia and the boy remembered, "At the top of the hill we turned around and saw the soldiers killing everyone." The Kurd took Elia, burned his clothes, gave him medicine for dysentery, and sold him to a blacksmith, who eventually sent him away. Elia sought refuge in a Syrian convent. In 1918, when the war was over, the American Near East Relief Foundation began to gather Armenian orphans and distribute them in its orphanages throughout the Middle East.

Elia was transferred to Lebanon, then to Nazareth in 1920. There, one of the teachers was a photographer and Elia worked for him. Elia learned the photography trade and became a prominent photographer. Many beloved pictures of early 20th-century Jerusalem were taken by Elia; the album, Through My Father's Eyes, celebrates his work.

Turkish authorities strive to discredit accounts such as Elia's, although his testimony is confirmed by an abundance of contemporary journalism, eyewitness accounts by statesmen such as American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, as well as German and Austrian documentation.

Charny claims there was "most certainly" a religious element in the persecution of the Armenians, the first empire to embrace the faith. (Armenia officially adopted Christianity as the state religion in 301 CE, about 25 years before the Roman Empire did so.) "There are even some who want to refer to this period overall as 'The Christian Genocide,' because the victims of the Turks' genocide were not only Armenians but also Assyrians and Greeks," he explains. Still, he is reticent to use that term as it "could seem to remove from the Armenian community their hard-won gains for recognition of the genocide of their people."

According to Charney, "What stands out about the denials of the Armenian genocide is that for many years, the full power of the Turkish government has been devoted to denials of the genocide. Turkey literally spends millions on advertising agencies and on publicity efforts. It also throws the considerable weight of its government behind coercing denials from other countries, with threats to the United States of not allowing American military planes to use Turkish air space or threatening to pull out of joint NATO military exercises, as well as with threats of major economic retaliation should or when a country, such as France, confirms recognition of the Armenian genocide.

"Israel is regularly the object of threats by the Turks and, regrettably to say the least, for many years has kowtowed to these threats. But then too so has the stronger United States"

MK Haim Oron (Meretz) proposed in March that the Knesset appoint a committee to consider recognizing the Armenian genocide, adding, "It is unacceptable that the Jewish people is not making itself heard." Although the measure passed, MK Shalom Simhon (Likud) responded, "this has become a politically charged issue between Armenians and Turks, and Israel is not interested in taking sides."

Many Israelis are eager for their country to recognize the genocide. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem will hold an event titled "A Symposium in Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide" at its Givat Ram campus on April 29 at 6:30 p.m. Both Kevork Kahvedjian and Charney will speak.

Israel will eventually recognize the genocide, insists Kevork, who manages his father's business, Elia Photo Service, in Jerusalem's Old City. Kevork, named for the baby left under a tree in the desert, believes, "One day they are going to say, 'Yes, it happened.' If not now, then in 50 years!"

Otherwise, Armenians worry, states that refuse to recognize the genocide risk rendering Hitler's rhetorical question a reality.

Swedish Archives Confirm: It Was A Genocide!

2008-04-25T13:19:00.002-04:00

SWEDISH ARCHIVES CONFIRM: IT WAS A GENOCIDE!

arminfo
22-04-2008

A recently conducted study at the Uppsala University has revealed
highly interesting information in the Swedish Archives, which once
again confirm the researchers' view of the events in the Ottoman
Turkey during the First World War: the Christian minorities, the
Armenians in particular, were subjected to genocide.

The massacres in Ottoman Turkey during the First World War claimed the
lives of approximately 1.5 million out of a world population of four
million Armenians, while over 250,000 Assyrians/Chadeans and equal
number of Pontic Greeks. In 1923, for the first time in over 2,500
years, Armenians no longer lived on 85 % of their fatherland. Thus,
the Armenian genocide was, in a sense, a successful genocide, acquiring
the perpetrators an Armenia without Armenians.

The conducted survey covers the period between 1915 and 1923 and
includes, among others, reports which the Swedish Ambassador, Cosswa
AnckarsvÃ¤rd, and the Swedish Military AttachÃ©, Einar af WirsÃ©n,
both stationed in Constantinople, sent to the Foreign Department
(found in the National Archive) and the General Staff Headquarters
(found in the War Archive) in Stockholm, respectively. In total, about
eighty documents were found with direct relevance to the so-called
Armenian Question, of which some are over-explicit in their message:
the Turkish Government conducted a systematic extermination of the
Armenian Nation.

On July 6, 1915, Ambassador AnckarsvÃ¤rd, writing to the Swedish
Foreign Minister, Knut Wallenberg, concludes: "Mr. Minister, The
persecutions of the Armenians have reached hair-raising proportions
and all points to the fact that the Young Turks want to seize the
opportunity, since due to different reasons there are no effective
external pressure to be feared, to once and for all put an end to the
Armenian question. The means for this are quite simple and consist
of the extermination [utrotandet] of the Armenian nation [emphasis
added]." AnckarsvÃ¤rd's reports until 1920 persisted in the same
insight. At several occasions, the Ambassador points out that "It is
obvious that the Turks are taking the opportunity to, now during the
war, annihilate [utplÃ¥na] the Armenian nation [emphasis added] so that
when the peace comes no Armenian question longer exists." In a later
report (1917) he underlines that the massacres are not clashes between
the Muslim and the Armenian populations, but "that the persecutions of
Armenians have been done at the instigation of the Turkish Government
[emphasis added]..." As an explanation to the prevailing famine in
Turkey during 1917, the Embassy Envoy Alhgren mentions the shortage of
workers, which is claimed partly to be a result of "the extermination
of the Armenian race [utrotandet af den armeniska rasen] [emphasis
added]". Major WirsÃ©n's reports to the General Staff concur with
AnckarsvÃ¤rd's analysis. In 1942 WirsÃ©n published his memoirs,
entitled Minnen frÃ¥n fred och krig ("Memories from Peace and War"),
reflecting upon his time as Swedish Military AttachÃ© in the Balkans
and Turkey. In a chapter entitled Mordet pÃ¥ en nation ("The Murder of
a Nation"), WirsÃ©n renders his observations of the Armenian massacres:
"Officially, these [deportations] had the goal to move the entire
Armenian population to the steppe regions of Northern Mesopotamia and
Syria, but in reality they aimed to exterminate [utrota] the Armenians
[emphasis added], whereby the pure Turkish element in Asia Minor would
achieve a dominating position." In the conclusion of this chapter he
recalls his conversation with the Turkish Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha
and notes: "The annihilation of the Armenian nation [emphasis added]
in Asia Minor must revolt all human feelings... The way the Armenian
problem was solved was hair-raising. I still can see in front of me
Talaat's cynical expression, when he emphasized that the Armenian
Question was solved."

The mentioned quotations are a fraction of the information presented
in the study. In addition to the mentioned archives of the Foreign
Ministry and the General Staff, the reports from the Swedish
missionaries and the Swedish newspapers were also included in the
study and concur with the same view.

The surveyed documents are mainly in regard to the Armenian Question,
but the data bed indicates that other Christian groups, such as Greeks
and Syriacs, were affected by the same fate.

The study clearly emphasises the concept of "bystander". While the word
itself implies that the bystanders do not participate in the genocide,
some contend that they are far from just a neutral viewer to the
tragedy, but passive participators in the annihilation. The British
statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke's statement captures
the essence of the bystanders to genocide: "the only thing necessary
for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." The documents
clearly indicate that the Swedish Government was well informed about
the state-orchestrated extermination of the Armenians. They also
disclose that the Government, fully in accordance with the policy
of a small state, consciously chose not to intervene in the matter,
neither during the massacres nor after when the League of Nations
suggested Sweden as a mandate power in Armenia.

While resorting to isolationism during the period of the implementation
of the genocide, Sweden followed the general stream, in particular that
of the Major Power's, during the post-war period when the question
of securing the future of the Armenian Nation was discussed. Sweden,
as all other states, chose to secure its national interests rather
than standing out from the rest by advocating Armenia's right and the
question of punishing the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. The
present-day Swedish Government does not seem to be willing to become
involved in the question either. Just last fall, the Foreign Minister
Carl Bildt, during an interpellation in the Swedish Parliament,
refrained from officially recognising the 1915 genocide, partly
by referring to "the need of additional research about what really
transpired in the Ottoman Empire."

The surveyed documents should at least quench that need; the official
reports from the Swedish Ambassador and the Swedish Military AttachÃ©
in Constantinople are unambiguous: Armenians were subjected to
genocide.

The study in its whole is included in a master thesis paper
which will be presented in the Higher Seminar at the Uppsala
University's Department of History. It will also be available at
http://www.armenica.org

Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust

2007-08-28T14:38:00.000-04:00

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2901136.ece
Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust
The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious episodes of the 20th century. Robert Fisk visits Yerevan, and unearths hitherto unpublished images of the first modern genocide

Published: 28 August 2007
The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move – men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum – in what is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most of the men were shot, the children – including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph – died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.

The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second – lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph – so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation. The Turks stuffed 90 Armenians into each of these wagons – the same average the Nazis achieved in their transports to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.

Hayk Demoyan, director of the grey-stone Museum of the Armenian Genocide in the foothills just outside Yerevan, the capital of present-day Armenia, stares at the photographs on his computer screen in bleak silence. A university lecturer in modern Turkish history, he is one of the most dynamic Armenian genocide researchers inside the remains of Armenia, which is all that was left after the Turkish slaughter; it suffered a further 70 years of terror as part of the Soviet Union. "Yes, you can have these pictures, he says. "We are still discovering more. The Germans took photographs and these pictures even survived the Second World War. Today, we want our museum to be a place of collective memory, a memorisation of trauma. Our museum is for Turks as well as Armenians. This is also [the Turks'] history."

The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite

clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists) Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.

Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed.

Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the Middle East – the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 – is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen.

In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians – including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at Gallipoli – have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called "merciless fury". Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people – their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for me.

Hayk Demoyan sits in his air-conditioned museum office, his computer purring softly on the desk, and talks of the need to memorialise this huge suffering. "You can see it in the writing of each survivor," he says. "When visitors come here from the diaspora – from America and Europe, Lebanon and Syria, people whose parents or grandparents died in our genocide – our staff feel with these people. They see these people become very upset, there are tears and some get a bit crazy after seeing the exhibition. This can be very difficult for us, psychologically. The stance of the current Turkish government [in denying the genocide] is proving they are proud of what their ancestors did. They are saying they are pleased with what the Ottomans did. Yet today, we are hearing that a lot of places in the world are like goldmines of archive materials to continue our work – even here in Yerevan. Every day, we are coming across new photographs or documents."

The pictures Demoyan gives to The Independent were taken by employees of Deutsche Bank in 1915 to send to their head office in Berlin as proof of their claims that the Turks were massacring their Armenian population. They can be found in the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute – Oriental Section (the photograph of the Armenian deportees across the desert published in The Independent today, for example, is registered photo number 1704 and the 1915 caption reads: "Deportation Camp near Erzerum.")

A German engineer in Kharput sent back a now-famous photogaph of Armenian men being led to their execution by armed Turkish police officers. The banking officials were appalled that the Ottoman Turks were using – in effect – German money to send Armenians to their death by rail. The new transportation system was supposed to be used for military purposes, not for genocide.

German soldiers sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army also witnessed these atrocities. Armin Wegner, an especially courageous German second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, took a series of photographs of dead and dying Armenian women and children. Other German officers regarded the genocide with more sinister interest. Some of these men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later as more senior officers conducting the mass killing of Jews in German-occupied Russia.

Computers have transformed the research of institutions like the Yerevan museum. Poorly funded scholarship has been replaced by a treasure-house of information that Demoyan is going to publish in scholarly magazines. "We have information that some Germans who were in Armenia in 1915 started selling genocide pictures for personal collections when they returned home... In Russia, a man from St Petersburg also informed us that he had seen handwritten memoirs from 1940 in which the writer spoke of Russian photographs of Armenian bodies in Van and Marash in 1915 and 1916." Russian Tsarist troops marched into the eastern Turkish city of Van and briefly liberated its doomed Armenian inhabitants. Then the Russians retreated after apparently taking these pictures of dead Armenians in outlying villages.

Stalin also did his bit to erase the memory of the massacres. The Armenian Tashnag party, so prominent in Armenian politics in the Ottoman empire, was banned by the Soviets. "In the 1930s," Demoyan says, "everyone destroyed handwritten memoirs of the genocide, photographs, land deeds – otherwise they could have been associated by the Soviet secret police with Tashnag material." He shakes his head at this immeasurable loss. "But now we are finding new material in France and new pictures taken by humanitarian workers of the time. We know there were two or three documentary films from 1915, one shot approvingly by a Kurdish leader to show how the Turks "dealt" with Armenians. There is huge new material in Norway of the deportations in Mush from a Norwegian missionary who was there in 1915."

There is, too, a need to archive memoirs and books that were published in the aftermath of the genocide but discarded or forgotten in the decades that followed. In 1929, for example, a small-circulation book was published in Boston entitled From Dardanelles to Palestine by Captain Sarkis Torossian. The author was a highly decorated officer in the Turkish army who fought with distinction and was wounded at Gallipoli. He went on to fight the Allies in Palestine but was appalled to find thousands of dying Armenian refugees in the deserts of northern Syria. In passages of great pain, he discovers his sister living in rags and tells how his fiancée Jemileh died in his arms. "I raised Jemileh in my arms, the pain and terror in her eyes melted until they were bright as stars again, stars in an oriental night... and so she died, as a dream passing." Torossian changed sides, fought with the Arabs, and even briefly met Lawrence of Arabia – who did not impress him.

"The day following my entry into Damascus, the remainder of the Arab army entered along with their loads and behind them on a camel came one they called... the paymaster. This camel rider I learned was Captain Lawrence... Captain Lawrence to my knowledge did nothing to foment the Arab revolution, nor did he play any part in the Arab military tactics. When first I heard of him he was a paymaster, nothing more. And so he was to Prince Emir Abdulah (sic), brother of King Feisal, whom I knew. I do not write in disparagement. I write as a fighting man. Some must fight and others pay." Bitterness, it seems, runs deep. Torossian eventually re-entered Ottoman Turkey as an Armenian officer with the French army of occupation in the Cilicia region. But Kemalist guerrillas attacked the French, who then, Torossian suspects, gave weapons and ammunition to the Turks to allow the French army safe passage out of Cilicia. Betrayed, Torossian fled to relatives in America.

There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appea r to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia – the present-day state of Armenia. Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia – in what is now Turkey – lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their lands. Demoyan disputes all this.

"The fundamental problem, I think, is that in the diaspora many don't want to recognise our statehood," he says. "We are surrounded by two countries – Turkey and Azerbaijan – and we have to take our security into account; but not to the extent of damaging memory. Here we must be accurate. I have changed things in this museum. There were inappropriate things, comments about 'hot-bloodied'people, all the old clichés about Turks – they have now gone. The diaspora want to be the holders of our memories – but 60 per cent of the citizens of the Armenian state are "repatriates" – Armenians originally from the diaspora, people whose grandparents originally came from western Armenia. And remember that Turkish forces swept though part of Armenia after the 1915 genocide – right through Yerevan on their way to Baku. According to Soviet documentation in 1920, 200,000 Armenians died in this part of Armenia, 180,000 of them between 1918 and 1920." Indeed, there were further mass executions by the Turks in what is now the Armenian state. At Ghumri – near the centre of the devastating earthquake that preceded final liberation from the Soviet Union – there is a place known as the "Gorge of Slaughter", where in 1918 a whole village was massacred.

But I sensed some political problems up at the Yerevan museum – international as well as internal. While many Armenians acknowledge that their countrymen did commit individual revenge atrocities – around Van, for example – at the time of the genocide, a heavy burden of more modern responsibility lies with those who fought for Armenia against the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. This mountainous region east of the Armenian state saw fierce and sometimes cruel fighting in which Armenians massacred Turkish Azeri villagers. The Independent was one of the newspapers that exposed this.

Yet when I arrive at the massive genocide memorial next to the museum, I find the graves of five "heroes" of the Karabakh war. Here lies, for instance, Musher "Vosht" Mikhoyan, who was killed in 1991, and the remains of Samuel "Samo" Kevorkian, who died in action in 1992. However upright these warriors may have been, should those involved in the ghastly war in Kharabakh be associated with the integrity and truth of 1915? Do they not demean the history of Armenia's greatest suffering? Or were they – as I suspect – intended to suggest that the Karabakh war, which Armenia won, was revenge for the 1915 genocide? It's as if the Israelis placed the graves of the 1948 Irgun fighters – responsible for the massacres of Palestinians at Deir Yassin and other Arab villages – outside the Jewish Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem near Jerusalem.

Officials later explain to me that these Kharabakh grave-sites were established at a moment of great emotion after the war and that today – while they might be inappropriate – it is difficult to ask the families of "Vosht" and "Samo" and the others to remove them to a more suitable location. Once buried, it is difficult to dig up the dead. Similarly, among the memorials left in a small park by visiting statesmen and politicians, there is a distinct difference in tone. Arab leaders have placed plaques in memory of the "genocide". Less courageous American congressman – who do not want to offend their Turkish allies – have placed plaques stating merely that they "planted this tree". The pro-American Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri left his own memorial less than a year before he was assassinated in 2005. "Tree of Peace," it says. Which rather misses the point.

And yet it is the work of archivists that will continue to establish the truth. In Yerevan you can now buy excellent witness testimonies of the genocide by Westerners who were present during the Armenian Holocaust. One of them is by Tacy Atkinson, an American missionary who witnessed the deportation of her Armenian friends from the town of Kharput. On 16 July 1915, she recorded in her secret diary how "a boy has arrived in Mezreh in a bad state nervously. As I understand it he was with a crowd of women and children from some village... who joined our prisoners who went out June 23... The boy says that in the gorge this side of Bakir Maden the men and women were all shot and the leading men had their heads cut off afterwards... He escaped... and came here. His own mother was stripped and robbed and then shot... He says the valley smells so awful that one can hardly pass by now."

For fear the Turkish authorities might discover her diaries, Atkinson sometimes omitted events. In 1924 – when her diary, enclosed in a sealed trunk, at last returned to the United States, she wrote about a trip made to Kharput by her fellow missionaries. "The story of this trip I did not dare write," she scribbled in the margin. "They saw about 10,000 bodies."

Anatomy of a massacre: How the genocide unfolded
By Simon Usborne
An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1917, either at the hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact figures are unknown, but each larger blob – at the site of a concentration camp or massacre – potentially represents the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened, stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First World War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the beleaguered Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition by siding with Russia.

On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were marched from their homes – the majority towards Syria and modern-day Iraq – via an estimated 25 concentration camps.

In 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles... It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people." Winston Churchill would later call the forced exodus an "administrative holocaust".

Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes the 1.5 million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not constitute what is now termed genocide – defined by the UN as a state-sponsored attempt to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". Instead, Ankara claims the deaths were part of the wider war, and that massacres were committed by both sides.

Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the Armenians (and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it remains illegal in Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last year, the Turkish foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as "unfounded".

One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian genocide was Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered the killing, "mercilessly and without compassion", of Polish men, women and children, he concluded: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Denying the Armenian genocide

2007-08-28T14:24:00.000-04:00

By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe
Thursday, August 23, 2007

Was there an Armenian genocide during World War I?

While it was happening, no one called the slaughter of Armenian Christians
by Ottoman Turks "genocide." No one could: The word wouldn't be coined for
another 30 years. But those who made it their business to tell the world
what the Turks were doing found other terms to describe the state-sponsored
mass murder of the Armenians.

In its extensive reporting on the atrocities, The New York Times described
them as "systematic," "deliberate," "organized by government" and a
"campaign of extermination." A Sept. 25, 1915, headline warned: "Extinction
Menaces Armenia." What the Turks were embarked upon, said one official in
the story that followed, was "nothing more or less than the annihilation of
a whole people."

Foreign diplomats, too, realized that they were observing genocide avant la
lettre. American consular reports leaked to the Times indicated "that the
Turk has undertaken a war of extermination on Armenians, especially those of
the Gregorian Church, to which about 90 percent of the Armenians belong." In
July, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau cabled Washington that "race murder"
was underway - a "systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian
populations and . . . to bring destruction and destitution upon them." These
were not random outbreaks of violence, Morgenthau stressed, but a nationwide
slaughter "directed from Constantinople."

Another U.S. diplomat, Consul Leslie Davis, described in grisly detail the
"reign of terror" he saw in Harput and the corpses of "thousands and
thousands" of Armenians murdered near Lake Goeljuk. The mass deportations
ordered by the Turks, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were
crammed into freight cars and shipped hundreds of miles to die in the desert
or at the hands of killing squads, were far worse than a straightforward
massacre, he wrote. "In a massacre many escape, but a wholesale deportation
of this kind in this country means a longer and perhaps even more dreadful
death for nearly everyone."

Other eyewitnesses, including American missionaries, provided
stomach-clenching descriptions of the "terrible tortures" mentioned by
Morgenthau. Women and girls were stripped naked and raped, then forced to
march naked through blistering heat. Many victims were crucified on wooden
crosses; as they writhed in agony, the Turks would taunt them: "Now let your
Christ come and help you!" Reuters reported that "in one village, 1,000 men,
women, and children are reported to have been locked in a wooden building
and burned to death." In another, "several scores of men and women were tied
together by chains and thrown into Lake Van."

Talaat Pasha, the Turkish interior minister who presided over the
liquidation of the Armenians, made no bones about his objective. "The
government . . . has decided to destroy complete all the indicated persons"
- the Armenians - "living in Turkey," he wrote to authorities in Aleppo.
"An end must be put to their existence . . . and no regard must be paid to
either age or sex, or to conscientious scruples."

Was there an Armenian genocide during World War I? The Turkish government
today denies it, but the historical record, chronicled in works like Peter
Balakian's powerful 2003 study, "The Burning Tigris," is overwhelming. Yet
the Turks are abetted in their denial and distortion by many who know
better, including the Clinton administration and both Bush administrations,
and prominent ex-congressmen-turned-lobbyists, including Republican Bob
Livingston and Democrats Dick Gephardt and Stephen Solarz.

Particularly deplorable has been the longtime reluctance of some leading
Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American
Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to call
the first genocide of the 20th century by its proper name. When Andrew
Tarsy, the New England director of the ADL, came out last week in support of
a congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, he was
promptly fired by the national organization. Shaken by the uproar that
followed, the ADL finally backed down. The murder of a million Armenians at
the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915, it acknowledged Tuesday, was "indeed
tantamount to genocide."

Now the other organizations should follow suit. Their unwillingness to
acknowledge that the Turks committed genocide stems from the fear that doing
so may worsen the plight of Turkey's beleaguered Jewish community or may
endanger the crucial military and economic relationship Israel has forged
with Turkey. Those are honorable concerns. But they cannot justify keeping
silent about a most dishonorable assault on the truth. Genocide denial must
be intolerable to everyone, but above all to those for whom "never again" is
such a sacred principle. And at a time when jihadist violence from Darfur to
Ground Zero has spilled so much innocent blood, dissimulation about the
jihad of 1915 can only aid our enemies.

The Armenian genocide is an incontestable fact of history. Shame on anyone
who refuses to say so.

Jeff Jacoby's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/opinion/edjacoby.php

Turk slaughter of Armenians is little-known (Dadrian interview reprint)

2007-05-01T08:21:00.001-04:00

Turk slaughter of Armenians is little-known (Dadrian interview reprint)

_____

The Armenian Genocide
Original Publication Date: 4/16/2000
(c) 2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

Original Headline: Turk slaughter of Armenians is little-known // An
author documents the overshadowed history of genocide during World War I
in the former Ottoman Empire.

By Eric Black; Staff Writer and Big Question blogger
http://www.startribune.com/blogs/bigquestion/?page_id=687

"Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"

That remark was uttered by Adolf Hitler a few days before Germany's
1939 invasion of Poland, which started World War II.

Hitler said he had ordered death squads to "exterminate without mercy
or pity, Polish men, women and children" who got in the way of
Germany's aims. They needn't worry about history's judgment, he said,
because history had already forgotten the massacre of more than a
million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire just 25 years earlier.

Vahakn Dadrian, who lectured in the Twin Cities last week, has made it
his life's work to keep alive the history of the Armenian genocide.

Armenians around the world commemorate the genocide every April. April
24 was the date in 1915 when about 300 Armenian intellectual and
professional leaders in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (modern
Istanbul) were rounded up, beginning a three-year killing spree.

The Armenian Cultural Organization of Minnesota will mark the tragedy
today with a lecture by Dadrian at the University of Minnesota.

The Armenian genocide ranks as one of the 20th century's biggest cases
of organized mass murder based on ethnic and religious differences. But
it is far less well-known than the biggest case - the Nazi-organized
slaughter of Jews, Gypsies and others - and several more recent ones
such as those in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Dadrian, director of genocide research at the Cambridge, Mass., and
Toronto-based Zoryan Institute and author of a 1995 book, "The History
of the Armenian Genocide," has devoted his adult life to documenting
the tragedy. And Dadrian is among the founders of a field known as
comparative study of genocide. He spoke twice in recent days, at St.

Cloud State University and at the Jewish Community Center of
Minneapolis, on his comparison between the Armenian genocide and the
Holocaust.

Modern Turkey, successor to the Ottoman Empire, denies that the deaths
of the Armenians were part of a program of genocide. Many countries,
including the United States, out of deference to the Turkish position,
have avoided officially recognizing the tragedy as a genocide. In April
1999, for example, President Clinton's statement on the anniversary
referred to the "deportation and massacre" of "so many innocent lives,"
but he avoided using the term "genocide."

Dadrian said a resolution pending in Congress, with more than 100
cosponsors, would recognize the genocide and authorize the United
States to create an archive to preserve materials documenting the case.

Turkish denial

In the 19th century, Armenia was part of the declining Ottoman Empire.

Anti-Armenian sentiment was a staple of Turkish politics. In 1894-96,
more than 150,000 Armenians were slaughtered, Dadrian said.

Early in the 20th century, the Ottomans lost their extensive holdings
in the Balkan peninsula in a war that started with nationalist
movements among several of the subject populations. Similar nationalist
sentiments were stirring in the Armenian regions. Dadrian said the
biggest part of the motive for the Turkish program of genocide was the
fear that Armenian nationalism would lead to the empire's loss of more
territory.

The Turkish denial that its predecessors committed genocide, Dadrian
said, relies on the argument that the government was merely trying to
relocate a troublesome population out of a war zone.

That argument was rebutted at the time by the U.S. ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire, Henry Morganthau, who witnessed much of the genocide.

In a 1917 book, he wrote: "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders
for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a
whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversation with
me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."

The way the Armenians were killed are staggeringly grisly and provide a
macabre contrast to the relatively bureaucratic and hi-tech methods
that the Nazis would employ 25 years later.

In a policy that Dadrian said was "unparalleled in the annals of human
history," the Turks "decided to rely not on soldiers but on
bloodthirsty criminals." Dadrian said 30,000 to 35,000 convicts were
released from prison to participate in the slaughter.

With a world war raging, Dadrian said, Ottoman officials were anxious
not to waste bullets or powder on the Armenians, so they employed four
main methods to kill the Armenians:

Many were beaten to death or killed with daggers, swords and axes.

Massive drowning operations were conducted in the tributaries of the
Euphrates River and the Black Sea. Bargeloads of Armenians were
intentionally sunk. Dadrian, quoting Morganthau, said that in places
the Armenian corpses became so numerous that the rivers were forced out
of their beds, in one case changing the course of a river for a
100-meter stretch.

The method that Dadrian called "the most fiendish" was to pack Armenian
women and children into stables or haylofts and then set them ablaze,
burning the victims alive. Dadrian estimated that about 150,000 were
killed by this method.

Hundreds of thousands more died of hunger, thirst or exposure during
forced marches in the desert. Dadrian said the Armenians were told they
were being relocated but were marched along routes chosen to maximize
the chances that none of the marchers would survive.

Estimates of the number of Armenians killed vary. Dadrian said the best
figure - just for the period 1915-1918 - is between 1.2 million and 1.3
million out of a pre-war population of Armenians within the Ottoman
Empire of about 4 million.

Cases compared

In comparing the tragedies that befell the Armenians and the Jews in
the 20th century, and looking at other cases of genocide or
near-genocide, Dadrian offered these observations:

The Jews and the Armenians were historical victims of persecution. Both
lacked a state of their own and had a minority status in every country
where they lived. This combination made them "fair game" for their
attackers.

Armenians and Jews were legally barred from power positions in their
societies, such as the military, government and civil service. Some
their members prospered in commercial fields, which made them objects
of envy and resentment. This element was also represented in the
Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, Dadrian said, where Tutsis were
perceived as controlling an unfair proportion of wealth relative to
Hutus.

Relative wealth combined with lack of access to political or military
power is a potent combination, Dadrian said, because it makes a group
into appealing targets of persecution but leaves them essentially
defenseless.

Although the genocide victims were already hated groups in both cases,
they were further degraded and vilified by official propaganda before
the killing started. Dadrian said the term "vermin" was commonly used
to describe Jews during the Nazi period and Armenians during the period
leading up their genocide.

Both genocidal campaigns occurred in the context of a larger war. Both
target populations were described as a dangerous internal enemy, which
made their massacre seem justifiable as an act of national security.

One lesson the world can learn from the comparative study, Dadrian
said, is that war itself can create the preconditions for genocide.

"War provides incentives for becoming barbarous, and it presents a
cloak or a guise for that barbarity," he said.

A key similarity that Dadrian said is often overlooked is that both
genocides were committed by particular political parties: the Nazis and
the Young Turks. Those who conceive the Holocaust as perpetrated by the
German nation or the German government are missing the fact that the
nation and the government had been overwhelmed by the Nazis, he said.

The Young Turk movement filled a similar role in the Turkish case.

The same factor is present in many of the other 20th-century genocides,
he said. For example, the Kurds of northern Iraq are being persecuted
not by Iraqis in general but by the ruling Baath Party.

The "killing fields" of Cambodia were created by the Khmer Rouge
movement that took over that country. Dadrian called the Cambodian case
especially unusual because it lacked an ethnic or religious component.

The perpetrators and victims were ethnically similar but on opposite
sides of a class and ideological divide.

The Turks and the Nazis operated in "an absence of external
deterrence," Dadrian said. While some rhetorical protests were filed in
both cases, the perpetrators understood that their victims had been
abandoned by the outside world.

Timeline/Summary:Turkey and the Armenians 1915-1922

The Turks believed that the Armenians would use an Allied victory to
set up an independent state. When many Armenians openly rejoiced at the
initial Allied success at the Dardanelles, the Turks turned upon them.

Between 1915-22, more than a million Armenians were killed and another
400,000 died in prison camps.

April-November 1915: More than 600,000 Armenians killed.

November 1915: 500,000 Armenians deported to Mesopotamia (modern day
Iraq); 90,000 survive the war.

August 1918: More than 400,000 Armenians killed by Turkish soldiers
during the Turkish advance through Russia.

February 1920: More than 30,000 Armenians killed; 80,000 fled to Syria.

September 1922: Remaining 100,000 Armenians driven out by Turks. In
1931, the Turkish government confiscated their property.

Source: "First World War Atlas" by Martin Gilbert

***

About Eric Black

Eric Black writes about national and world news for the Star Tribune. He
specializes in pieces that try to put the news into historical
perspective. He has been a journalist since 1973, with the Star Tribune
since 1977, and is the author of 1.74 million newspaper articles and
five books.

Black launched the Big Q in December 2005 to see if he could save the
world from ignorance and error. Ignorance and error are still running
slightly ahead in the polls, so, in February 2007, Black recruited the
lovely D.J. Tice as a co-blogger.

About D.J. Tice
D.J. Tice has been Politics and Government Team Leader at the Star
Tribune since 2003, supervising coverage of Minnesota political news.

Earlier, Tice was a columnist and editorial writer at the St. Paul
Pioneer Press for 12 years.

He's also earned a paycheck as publisher of the since-vanished Twin
Cities Reader, as an inflight magazine editor for the since-vanished
TWA, and as a writer/editor for several additional enterprises that have
perished from the earth. Tice has written two hard-to-find books and
joins the Big Q in hopes of enlightening a benighted world or at least
learning to set up a hyperlink.

TURKISH BELIEVERS "SATANICALLY TORTURED" BEFORE BEING KILLED

2007-04-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

TURKISH BELIEVERS "SATANICALLY TORTURED" BEFORE BEING KILLED

BosNewsLife, Hungary
April 26 2007

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT, READERS' DISCRETION ADVISED

ISTANBUL, TURKEY (BosNewsLife)-- There was increased concern
Thursday, April 26, about the plight of active Christians in Turkey
after investigators revealed that three evangelical believers were
"satanically tortured" last week before being killed.

The influential American human rights group International Christian
Concern (ICC) with website www.persecution.org told BosNewsLife that
the circumstances surrounding the deaths of German Tilman Ekkehart
Geske, 45, and Turkish Christians Necati Aydin, 35, and Ugur Yuksel
,32, at the Christian Zirve publishing house were even worse than
thought.

ICC, based in Washington DC, said the troubles began on Easter
Sunday when five of the alleged killers had been to a service that
Pastor Necati arranged in the eastern town of Malatya, the capital
of Malatya province.

The men were reportedly known to local believers as searching for
the faith in Christ. The suspects, one of whom is the son of a mayor
in the Province of Malatya, are part of a tarikat, or a group of
"faithful believers" in Islam, ICC added.

Tarikat membership is "like a fraternity membership" and means that
"no one can get into public office without membership" of such
a group, ICC said. "On the day of the killing, the young Muslim
men had arranged to meet the Christians at 10:00 am [local time]
to ostensibly learn more about the Bible. They had gathered guns,
bread knives, ropes and towels [as] they knew there would be a lot
of blood, ready for their act of service to Allah," ICC stressed.

READING BIBLE

After Necati read a chapter from the Bible the assault reportedly
began. "The young men tied Ugur, Necati, and Tilman's hands and feet
to chairs as they videoed their work on their cell phones," ICC said,
adding that what "followed in the next three hours is beyond belief."

ICC said the men were "disemboweled, and their intestines sliced up in
front of their eyes. They were emasculated and watched as those body
parts were destroyed." The group added that "fingers were chopped off"
and "their noses and mouths and anuses were sliced open" as part of
what it called "satanic torture."

It added that "possibly the worst part was watching as their brothers
were likewise tortured. Tilman was stabbed 156 times, Necati 99 times
and Ugur's stabs were too numerous to count."

Finally, their throats were sliced from ear to ear, and their "heads
practically decapitated," ICC said.

Several hours later at 12:30 local time a fellow Christian reportedly
arrived at the publishing house but discovered that the door was
locked from the inside. After he called cell phones of the men, Ugur
apparently answered his phone saying: "We are not at the office. Go
to the hotel meeting. We are there. We will come there." Yet as Ugur
spoke he heard in the background weeping and a strange snarling sound,
ICC said, citing its investigation.

POLICE INTERVENTION

After he phoned police the nearest officer arrived in about five
minutes and pounded on the door shouting: "Police, open up,!" reports
said.

Initially the officer apparently believed it was a domestic
disturbance, but when he heard another snarl and a gurgling moan he
understood that sound as human suffering, ICC explained. The officer
"prepared the clip in his gun and tried over and over again to burst
through the door. One of the frightened assailants unlocked the door
for the policeman, who entered to find a grisly scene."

Reports said the attack happened following Muslim protests against
the distribution of Bibles and other Christian literature by the
publishing house for which they worked.

One of the victims, Necati Aydin, a husband and father of two young
children, was also an actor who reportedly played the role of Jesus
Christ in a theater production that TURK-7 network aired over the
Easter holidays.

DETENTION DEMANDED

Prosecutors have asked a court to allow jailing 11 suspects, 10 young
men and a woman, pending trial over the gruesome murder of the three
Christians. A 12th suspect, allegedly the leader, remains in hospital
with a serious head injury after jumping from the third-floor office
of the Christian publishing house in Malatya where the victims were
killed, to escape arrest.

At least four of the suspects have reportedly been charged with
"founding a terrorist organization and murder within the framework of
the organization." In a first reaction, Tillman's wife publicly forgave
the those who killed her husband saying "they know not what they do."

ICC President Jeff King said he was impressed by the "contrast between
the acts of the killers and the forgiveness of Tillman's wife." He
said it was "glaring and in the end seems to be at the center of this
story for us. For in the end, these events serve as a stark reminder
of the difference between Islam and Christianity."

He added that, for "the 'faithful' Muslims, following their god meant
brutally killing three men [with the excuse] "we did this to protect
Islam". For the faithful Christians, following God meant forgiving
the men who had tortured and murdered their loved ones."

The attacks have added to concern among Turkish Christians who comprise
about 0.2 percent of the mainly Muslim nation of over 71 million
people. The murders followed the January murder of Turkish-Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink and the shooting of Italian Roman Catholic
priest Andrea Santoro in the town of Trabzon in February 2006. (With
reporting from Turkey).

THE NEGLECTED OF THE WORLD

2007-04-20T11:20:00.000-04:00

http://www.churchofarmenia.com/english.htm

Memories of Eyewitness-Survivors of the Armenian Genocide

2007-04-12T09:54:00.000-04:00

Memories of Eyewitness-Survivors of the Armenian Genocide: "MEMORIES OF EYEWITNESS-SURVIVORS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE"

SHOGHER ABRAHAM TONOYAN'S TESTIMONY

2007-04-12T09:51:00.000-04:00

SHOGHER ABRAHAM TONOYAN'S TESTIMONY
(Born in 1901, Moosh, Vardenis village)

My grandfather's name was Hovhannes and my grandma's name was Kishmish. In the days of the Sultan they took my grandfather to Istanbul by force. They imprisoned him. My grandfather died in the prison.

I was born in 1901 in the village of Vardenis, Moosh region. There were eight hundred Armenian families in our village. Meghraget (Honey River - in Arm.) flowed through our village. When it rained, the fish came out of the water. We brought drinking water from the fountain in jugs.

The roofs of our houses were covered with earth. The tundir was in the middle of the house. We used to bake lavash (Armenian bread) every day. There was a hearth outside the house and we burned wood in it. Outside, there were two stones at the foot of the wall, upon which there was a cross-shaped iron grate to hold the cauldron.

The house, where we lived, was large. We had no garden. There was a special place in our house where we arranged the folded beds one on top of another, which reached the ceiling. There were no bedsteads. It was a dark world. We raised sheep, cows, buffaloes, horses. We sowed wheat, lentil and linseed. We had twelve buffaloes, eight cows, two hundred sheep. We had a plough. Five-six families came together and ploughed the land and sowed. We had so much wheat that there was no place to store the crop.

The land belonged to the Turks. We paid land tax. The wheat was sown, was harvested and threshed, then the bran was given to the wind. When they finished, a man came from the Turkish government together with the village chief and he brought a stick with him. He drew lines on the wheat pile. The Turk measured seven parts gave them to the owner of the wheat and took away one part. There was no tax for peas, lentil and linseed.

In our house everybody knew his work: they were divided. Seven women lived peacefully in the house, daughters-in-law and sisters-in-law; the eldest woman was the manager. Our daughters-in-law were Voski, Mariam and Naré...

In the evening and morning everyone went to church. Elderly women, young women and girls used to wear their nice clothes and went to church. On holidays we fasted. There was church service every day. Our village had two priests. The Turks killed both of them. There couldn't be any marriage without the church. The bride used to wear nice clothes made of good material, a jacket, on her head there was a head-wear made of silver. Her face was covered with yellow-green-red cloth. Her face remained closed till she had her first child born. The bride's dress was velvet. The clothes of our country were nice. The girls were married at the age of thirteen-fourteen. If she became twenty, they didn't marry her, they said: "She's old, she has remained at home." They used to have many children. They gave the girl a dowry: quilts, mattresses, pillows, shawls and stockings. The bride was given gold rings, golden necklaces as a present. On carnivals dhol-zourna (Armenian national instruments) played: they ate and drank. We made halva: gata. During the feast days we made bishi (pastry fried in oil - in Turk.).

It was hot in our country. There was a shed: in hot weather we used to sit there and talk. The women didn't work outside; they worked only at home. In hot weather we used to bathe in the river every day. We had a well. There was something like a pond where water gathered: horses used to bathe in it and then they let the water flow to the fields.

In Mush there were no doctors; there were hakeems. We were very healthy, we lived well, there wasn't much to care.

There was a school in our village. Children came from ten other villages to our village-school. The school was for boys. Girls didn't go to school; they made handiwork at home. There was a teacher in our village. There were books. The people of our village read the Bible; they read Armenian books.

Until the proclamation of Hurriyet they didn't take young men to the army. My uncle went to the Turkish army.

We had Kurd friends from Kurd villages; they used to come to our house. The plates, spoons, cups for the Kurds were washed and kept in the bread barns. We had no right to eat with them. My cousin was ten years old during the massacre; our Kurd friend took him to their place and saved him. The Kurds were better than the Turks. There are good and bad people among the Turks, there are good and bad people among the Kurds, and there are good and bad people among the Armenians. There are good and bad people among every nation.

Teacher Margar, God bless his soul, was a revolutionary; he fought with the askyars, they took him to Moosh and hanged him. The Turks cut off his head. The Armenians bought his head with gold, took it to St. Karapet of Moosh and buried it under the monastery wall. It is said that a ray of light descended every day on his grave. Margar's grave had become sacred place of pilgrimage for the Armenians.

Under the pretence of taking the youth to serve in the army, the Turks gathered them, took them away and butchered them.

My father Abraham had a rifle, the Turks came and killed him with his own gun, then tied a rope to his neck, pulled him and threw him into the fire and burned him. My mother Altoun saw it, couldn't stand it and died on the spot. My brother Hovhannes sucked his mother's milk only for ten days. My brother and I remained orphans.

On the day of Vardavar (the Transfiguration of Christ), 1915, The Turkish askyars (policemen) brought Chechen brigands from Daghestan to massacre us. They came to our village and robbed everything. They took away our sheep, oxen and properties. Those who were good-looking were taken away. My aunt's young son, who was staying with me, was also taken away, together with all the males in the town. They gathered the young and the elderly in the stables of the Avzut village, set fire and burned them alive. Those cattle-sheds were as large as those of our collective farms. They shut people in the stables of Malkhas Mardo, they piled up stacks of hay round them, poured kerosene and set on fire. Sixty members of our great family were burned in those stables. I do not wish my enemy to see the days I have seen, lao! Only I and my brother were saved. From the beginning, they took away the young pretty brides and girls to turkize them and also they pulled away the male infants from their mothers' arms to make them policemen in the future. The stable was filled with smoke and fire, people started to cough and to choke. Mothers forgot about their children, lao! It was a real Sodom and Gomorrah. People ran, on fire, to and fro, struck against the walls, trod upon the infants and children who had fallen on the ground. ...What I have seen with my eyes, lao! I don't wish the wolves of the mountain to see! They say that, at these distressing scenes, the Turkish mullah hung himself. During that turmoil the greatest part of the people choked and perished. The roof of the stable collapsed and fell upon the dead. I wish I and my little brother had been burned down in that stable and had not seen how sixty souls were burned down alive. I wish I had not seen the cruel and ungodly acts of those irreligious people. The Armenians of the neighboring villages of Vardenis, Meshakhshen, Aghbenis, Avzut, Khevner and others were burnt in the same manner in their stables. I do not wish my enemy to see what I have seen. There was a very old woman among us. Those who knew her called her Polo, Arshak's mother-in-law. She was about one hundred years old. When smoke began to enter the stable, she gathered the children and made them lie on their faces, their nose and mouth on the ground, then she made their mothers lay on them. She made my brother also lie on the ground. She took off her apron, covered him with it and pushed me to lie down on my brother and not let him get up, even if he cried. May God bless her soul. That woman said: "Lao, what's the use of crying, we must act so that from each house one boy remains alive and comes out of the fire, so that their hearth is not extinguished, so that they may tell the world the acts of these godless and ruthless Turks. People, don't get disappointed, don't lose your head, be staunch in your belief. God is great; He shall open a door." I covered my brother with my body. Fallen on his nose and mouth in the dirt of the stable, the poor boy wasn't able to breathe, he wanted to come out. He cried and cried, he cried so much that he fainted and calmed down. When the roof of the stable collapsed, the flame and the smoke escaped from the opening, and air penetrated in the stable. I and my uncle's daughter, Areg, took my unconscious brother by the arms and legs and, treading on burnt logs and corpses, we came out through the breach. There we saw the Turkish soldiers dancing in round, swinging and striking their sabers and singing merrily 'Yürü, yavrum, yürü!' ('Walk, my child, walk!'). Up to this day that song resounds in my ears. That dance, lao, should never be danced in an Armenian house; that's the dance of the ruthless, godless, wild beasts. Fascinated with the dance they didn't see us. I put my brother on my back and ran away. I escaped and entered the nearby reeds. When dark fell I took my brother and ran away. How far did I run, or where, I don't know? Suddenly I saw people coming towards us. I took my brother and hid under the shrubs. Then I heard those people speaking Armenian. I ran and joined the group. That was Andranik's group. May I die before his foot-dust! We went. Wherever we went the Turks cut our way. We went to Persia together with Andranik, on the way to Khoy, the Turks were in front of us. We ran away: we went to Nakhidjevan, Gharabagh, Ghapan, Goris, Sissian, Sevan... Eh, lao, where didn't we escape to, where didn't we suffer! From the Goris pastures we came to Talin. What days I've seen, lao, I don't wish my enemy to see!

In a village near Sissian or Goris - its name was Aghoudi-Vaghoudi - the refugees had gathered wheat ears about 5-6 kg. Together with 8-10 small children they had gone to the water mill of the valley to grind the wheat. Those children went and didn't come back. Grown-up men went to see what was the matter. What did they see? I wish my eyes had become blind, so that I wouldn't see... The Azeri-Turks had filled the children into the chimney of the mill and had burned them. Lao, the Turks here don't differ from the Turks there. To tell the truth, they are even worse, more pitiless and crueler than the Turks of our country.

They came and told Andranik that the Turks had filled the young boys into the chimney and had burned them alive. Andranik pasha took off his papakh, knelt on the ground and swore that he would avenge the young boys' massacre. He did avenge. He made short work of the Turks of that village, may I fall a victim at Andranik's feet.

In 1922 we came to the Talin region, to the Mehriban (now: Katnaghbyur) village. This village had been an Armenian village. The Turks had occupied and destroyed our churches; when they began constructing the road, they dug the ground and many khachkars were found. I married Grigor Tonoyan from Sassoun, Arpi village. My husband became the first chairman of our village-council. He had no education, but he was very intelligent. Of my ill fate, he died in 1955. I have brought up nine children. Their names are: Aghavni, Vardoush, Gulnaz, Mkrtich, Sarkis, Vachagan, Hreghen, Anahit, Shoushik. I have thirty-six grand-children and great-grand-children. They are good children. None of them became a hooligan.

My brother got his education in the orphanage of Kars, he became a well-educated teacher. I wish I hadn't given him to the orphanage, he had better stayed with me and became a choban (shepherd - in Turk.), then he would have married, have his family, his children, he would have filled what the Turks had emptied. I saved my baby brother from the Turks' sword and fire, thinking there wouldn't be other swords. I said: "This is Armenia: there aren't any Turks or fire here. I thought, let him study and become an educated person and let him tell the world what we saw. How should I know, lao, that there would be the 1937 exile [of Stalin period in the USSR] for us?"

My brother Hovhannes Abrahamian was born in 1912 in Moosh. My brother came from the orphanage, he went to Russia, Krasnodar, then he came to Meghri, Aparan as a school-inspector, then he became director of Talin - Azizbekov, Gndevaz village schools. In 1937 he was accused as a member of the Dashnak party. 1937 was a year of harvest. They took him away, they took away many, many people, they took away my only-born brother as well. They connected my brother with Yeghishé Charents and Aghassi Khandjian and they took him away: they took him away and they ruined him. I freed him from the mouth of the beast, I saved him and brought him here and I threw him into the mouth of the godless hyena. The godless and impious hyena took away my only brother; it took him away and devoured him. I cry night and day. I will cry up to my grave. I want my brother's name to be written on my grave-stone. In this big, large world I have no one else left besides my children, nothing else, I'm all alone...

My son Sarkis¹ is my sole hope and protector. God is in Heaven, here, below is Sargis. My son Sargis took me by the hand and we went to the Monument of the Genocide [in Yerevan]; mourning and crying I lay flowers there and it seemed to me all my burned ones were there. It was the Tomb of all my lost ones. I cry very much, I want to go to our land. I want to go and drink the sweet water of our Meghraget, I want to breathe the fresh air of our mountains, of my sweet land. The taste and smell of our land was different, lao. I want very much to go to our land. I hope, by God, I know, I won't see it, but my children, my grand-children shall see it, our Moosh will become Armenia, as Yerevan is our city today.

I wish all the Armenians hope, love, faith honesty and conscience. This country is good, but it doesn't believe in God. If you have conscience, you are righteous; your soul is holy.

1 Shogher Tonoyan's son, Doctor Sargis Tonoyan, has told us about his uncle Hovhannes Abrahamian's and Armenian poet Yeghishé Charents's friendship. It turned out that Charents and Hovhannes had been in the same jail in 1937. Doctor of Historical Sciences, Colonel Armenak Manoukian has discovered from the archives of the Ministry of State Security, Republic of Armenia, Y. Charents's poem "He Burned the 'Capital'," where the great poet has written about his prison life and has dedicated several verses to our tormented narrator Shogher Tonoyan:
Holding grand-son by the hand,
And a sack on her shoulder,
Poor old Shogho her head bent low,
Implored the guard of the prison:
"It is three days we have left home,
And we're waiting for our turn,
To hand over some clothes and bread."
But who was listening to her?
"The chief of guards came," they said.
Poor old Shogho ran to him.
"About meeting with him again?
Then tomorrow...!"

Impressive lecture by Akcam in Amsterdam

2007-04-10T14:26:00.001-04:00

Impressive lecture by Akcam in Amsterdam (18 December 2006)

By I. Drost

Well documented and eloquent, Turkish professor of History Taner Akcam, held a lecture at University of Amsterdam on 18 December 2006. The meeting was organised by CREA Studium Generale in cooperation with Humanist Broadcasting Foundation (HUMAN) and Dutch Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Taner Akcam was invited to give a lecture in Amsterdam because of the current debate in the Dutch media and politics on the Armenian Genocide. HUMAN wanted to contribute in a positive way to this debate by improving the knowledge on this matter. The event coincided with the publication of Akcams new book A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, which will be published in Dutch in May 2007.

Prior to the lecture the participants to this event, among whom many members of Turkish and Armenian communities of the Netherlands, watched the Dutch documentary A wall of silence by Dorothee Forma, a HUMAN production in 1997. This documentary film parallels the personal and professional lives of Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian and Turkish researcher Taner Akcam and their call for recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

Introducing Taner Akcam professor Erik-Jan ZՖrcher, professor of Turkish language and culture at the University of Leiden, mentioned that Akcam is one of the scholars, who presents the state of the art in his field of research. He combines in his research Armenian scientific publications, documents from Ottoman archives and Turkish Military Tribunal of 1919 as well as documents found in the German archives.

After Akcams speech many Turks stood up to protest rather than ask questions, but Akcam peacefully and effectively managed to give clear response and at the same time tried to pacify the Turks by repeating the statement: we have to learn to talk.

Akcam focussed in his lecture on his findings in Ottoman archives, especially the material available in the Prime Ministerial Archives (Basbakanlik Osmanli Arsivi) in Istanbul. According to him a number of documents can also be found online. At the same time he mentioned that lots of documents have been removed from the archives. For the cleaning itself there are more than enough evidences; lots of documents concerning Armenian deportations and massacres have been destroyed during the crime.

He explained also how total cleaning of archives is impossible, even when the government demanded to burn documents directly after reading. Orders and documents were always copied for different departments and it is impossible to retrace and destroy all of them.

Akcam said that the first deportations and forced migration already began in 1913 with the deportation of Greeks from the Aegean area. This forced migration expanded to the other minorities: Assyrians and Muslims from Bulgaria etc. whose lives were affected in different ways, depending on the intention of the government. While the goal with respect to the non-Turkish Muslims was the Turkification, in the case of the Armenians the intention to annihilate the whole population is evident from many documents. Regarding to the deportation this intention was present as the authorities were aware of the effect of these deportations, but still continued to handle in the same way. Other evident examples are the decrees issued by the government on the Armenian properties, which gives strong indications that the intention of the Young Turk rulers was the annihilation of Armenians. Akcam also explained why UN Genocide Convention (1948) is applicable to Armenian case. For example forcible transfer of Armenian children to Muslims constitutes one of elements of the UN definition of genocide. Also young Armenian girls were forced to marry Muslims. This is well documented.

Answering a question about the Turkish proposal to Armenia to form a joint commission of Turkish and Armenian historians, professor ZՖrcher said that a dialogue is necessary, but that the proposal is not as innocent as it seems, because of the conditions put forward by Turkey. Turkey wants the historians to be appointed by the governments and also all political discussion on historical subjects to be suspended during the work of the commission. It should not come as a surprise that Armenia cannot accept the proposal under such conditions.

Akcam elaborated on this issue by putting the rhetoric question how such a commission could function when there is no normal relation between the two countries. Even a letter from Ankara first has to go to Tbilisi in Georgia before reaching Armenia. Akcam agrees therefore with Armenian government that a commission is necessary to deal with all issues. He would also suggest the EU to compose a roadmap that includes a step-by-step approach for solving all problems.

When Turks who brought up a Turkish translation of a book (1923) by the first Armenian Prime Minister (1918) H. Katchaznouni, in which the author would have admitted the role of Armenian voluntary troops in the Russian army, Taner Akcam said, that even if this is corrrect, would it mean that the genocide had not taken place? And what was the culpability of Armenians living peacefully far from the Russian borders, who had nothing to do with the events in Eastern Turkey? Comparing with World War II, would the fact that one million Germans were killed after the war in several countries mean that the Holocaust did not occur?

Referring to the alleged 100 thousand Turks killed by Armenians, Akcam recalled that the figure given by Turkish Military in 1917 in this respect, is in total approximately 5000 deaths, for all the places involved. But we regret every victim, he added.

Akcam made a great impression by the way he dealt with sometimes-aggressive way of acting by Turkish audience. He asked to remain calm and show more respect towards each other, but also repeating and reassuring that Turks and Armenians are not the only two peoples in the world that have problems with each other and that there are ways to solve these problems, like it is done in South Africa, and that this process needs time and effort.

Source: Abovian Armenian Cultural Association (Netherlands)

21 December 2006

http://www.abovian.nl/blog/archive/2006/12/23/2173.aspx

The truth should be proclaimed loudly

2007-03-19T13:08:00.000-04:00

Nouvelles d'Arménie, France
March 17 2007

Robert Fisk : The truth should be proclaimed loudly

samedi 17 mars 2007, Stéphane/armenews

When has any publisher ever tried to avoid publicity for his book ?

Published : 17 March 2007

Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It's from a letter
from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the
Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation.
The reason, of course, is a chapter entitled "The First Holocaust",
which records the genocide of one and a half million Armenians by the
Ottoman Turks in 1915, a crime against humanity that even Lord Blair
of Kut al-Amara tried to hide by initially refusing to invite
Armenian survivors to his Holocaust Day in London.

It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle
East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even
before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly
murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read
the following, from their message to my London publishers
HarperCollins, remember it is written by the citizen of a country
that seriously wishes to enter the European Community. Since I do not
speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses
in Mr Osman's otherwise excellent English.

"We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey
concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems,
Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting
worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has
reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the
political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political
atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of
April 2007... Therefore we would like to undertake the publication
quietly, which means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk's
book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to
us if any trial [is] ... held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk
and HarperCollins can understand our reservations."

Well indeedydoody, I can. Here is a publisher in a country
negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds,
Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) - even Turkey's bid to join the EU,
for heaven's sake - is reason enough to try to sneak my book out in
silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any
publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book ? Well, I can give
you an example. When Taner Akcam's magnificent A Shameful Act : The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was
first published in Turkish - it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents
and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a
terrifying historical fact - the Turkish historian experienced an
almost identical reaction. His work was published "quietly" in Turkey
- and without a single book review.

Now I'm not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is
one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I
live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink's foul murder,
I'm in no position to lecture my colleagues in Turkey to stand up to
the racism that killed Dink. While I'm sipping my morning coffee on
the Beirut Corniche, Mr Osman could be assaulted in the former
capital of the Ottoman empire. But there's a problem nonetheless.

Some months earlier, my Turkish publishers said that their lawyers
thought that the notorious Law 301 would be brought against them - it
is used to punish writers for being "unTurkish" - in which case they
wanted to know if I, as a foreigner (who cannot be charged under
301), would apply to the court to stand trial with them. I wrote that
I would be honoured to stand in a Turkish court and talk about the
genocide. Now, it seems, my Turkish publishers want to bring my book
out like illicit pornography - but still have me standing with them
in the dock if right-wing lawyers bring charges under 301 !

I understand, as they write in their own letter, that they do not
want to have to take political sides in the "nonsensical collision
between nationalists and neo-liberals", but I fear that the roots of
this problem go deeper than this. The sinister photograph of the
Turkish police guards standing proudly next to Dink's alleged
murderer after his arrest shows just what we are up against here. Yet
still our own Western reporters won't come clean about the Ottoman
empire's foul actions in 1915. When, for example, Reuters sent a
reporter, Gareth Jones, off to the Turkish city of Trabzon - where
Dink's supposed killer lived - he quoted the city's governor as
saying that Dink's murder was related to "social problems linked to
fast urbanisation". A "strong gun culture and the fiery character of
the people" might be to blame.

Ho hum. I wonder why Reuters didn't mention a much more direct and
terrible link between Trabzon and the Armenians. For in 1915, the
Turkish authorities of the city herded thousands of Armenian women
and children on to boats, set off into the Black Sea - the details
are contained in an original Ottoman document unearthed by Akcam -
"and thrown off to drown". Historians may like to know that the man
in charge of these murder boats was called Niyazi Effendi. No doubt
he had a "fiery character".

Yet still this denial goes on. The Associated Press this week ran a
story from Ankara in which its reporter, Selcan Hacaoglu, repeated
the same old mantra about there being a "bitter dispute" between
Armenia and Turkey over the 1915 slaughter, in which Turkey
"vehemently denies that the killings were genocide". When will the
Associated Press wake up and cut this cowardly nonsense from its
reports ? Would the AP insert in all its references to the equally
real and horrific murder of six million European Jews that right-wing
Holocaust negationists "vehemently deny" that there was a genocide ?
No, they would not.

But real history will win. Last October, according to local newspaper
reports, villagers of Kuru in eastern Turkey were digging a grave for
one of their relatives when they came across a cave containing the
skulls and bones of around 40 people - almost certainly the remains
of 150 Armenians from the town of Oguz who were murdered in Kuru on
14 June 1915. The local Turkish gendarmerie turned up to examine the
cave last year, sealed its entrance and ordered villagers not to
speak of what they found. But there are hundreds of other Kurus in
Turkey and their bones, too, will return to haunt us all. Publishing
books "quietly" will not save us.

http://www.armenews.com/article.php3?id_article=30416

Armenian Genocide At The Berlin Film Festival

2007-02-16T12:52:00.000-05:00

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AT THE BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL
By Wolfgang Hobel and Alexander Smoltczyk

Der Spiegel Online, Germany
Feb 14 2007

'The Lark Farm' Wakens Turkish Ghosts

The film "The Lark Farm" is sure to stir up controversy at this year's
Berlin Film Festival. It takes a close look at Turkey's most sensitive
taboo -- the 1915 genocide against the Armenians. Extra security has
been brought in for the Wednesday evening premiere.

All that was missing at the Festival Palace was the wave cheer, given
the level of enthusiasm with which Dieter Kosslick, the festival's
director, staged the opening gala of the 57th Berlin International
Film Festival last Thursday. Once again, Kosslick has managed to
position the German capital as a world-class film city, and this
year's Berlinale again vies with past festivals in its relentless
determination to deliver euphoria.

Photo Gallery: Controversial Film at the Berlin Film Festival Click
on a picture to launch the image gallery (3 Photos) The French film
"La Vie en rose," the first film on the festival's schedule, matched
the effusive mood of the event. In the film, director Olivier Dahan
tells the life story of singer Edith Piaf, sumptuously portraying
her descent into drug addiction and disastrous love affairs. The
president of the festival's jury Paul Schrader -- himself a writer,
director and film critic -- has said he sees film as a kind of museum,
or cultural memory bank. It's an interpretation that clearly applies
to this year's festival.

Steven Soderbergh's black-and-white drama "The Good German," provides
a good example. George Clooney portrays an American reporter in
post-World War II Germany who is tragically in love with a beautiful
but mysterious woman (Cate Blanchett). The American thriller "The Good
Shepherd," starring Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon and Alec Baldwin and
directed by Robert De Niro, is a story about the early days of the
CIA. In the historical drama "Die Falscher" ("The Counterfeiters"),
Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky describes how inmates at the
Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen were forced to print British
pound notes in a counterfeiting workshop.

Taboo in Turkey

But there is one film that will encounter little competition for
being the most important and stirring contribution to the culture of
reminiscence. It deals with the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, a
topic that is still considered taboo in Turkey. Indeed, sentiments on
the issue are so strong that representatives of the Turkish government
are still trying to convince others to avoid the topic as well. Last
week, for example, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul made it
clear that relations between his country and the United States could
be seriously jeopardized by a resolution proposed in the US Congress
that would officially condemn the 1915 genocide committed by the Turks.

"If this resolution is approved," Gul threatened representatives of
the Bush administration, which is seeking a strategic partnership
with Turkey, "why should we continue to support one another?"

FROM THE MAGAZINE Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL
article in your publication. Close to a century after the Armenian
genocide, the issue remains explosive. When Turkish novelist and Nobel
laureate Orhan Pamuk had the courage to write about the genocide, he
was promptly taken to court by ultra-nationalists. After the murder
of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, Pamuk, fearing for his
own life, fled abroad.

The Armenian genocide is sure to become a hot-button issue in Berlin
-- home to about 250,000 Turks -- where legendary directors Paolo
and Vittoria Taviani will premiere their new film "The Lark Farm"
on Wednesday evening. It is a shocking film about the genocide and
the film's distributor is nervous. The festival management, fearing
riots, has hired additional security.

Bundles of flesh

It is a film filled with vivid images and meaningful gestures. In one
scene, a Turkish soldier stands awkwardly next to an opulently set
table. He carefully picks up the soup bowl, lifts it into the air,
pauses for a moment, and then slowly pours the soup over the damask
tablecloth. The horror begins with the insignificant, setting the
stage for the unimaginable in the most polite of ways.

In another scene, Turkish servants suddenly refuse to unload the
truck belonging to their Armenian masters, saying that it's too
late in the day for work. A short time later, the masters, already
earmarked for slaughter as enemies of the people, have been reduced
to sobbing bundles of flesh as they beg for their lives. Such is how
genocide begins.

In their past masterpieces, "Padre Padrone" (1977) and "Notte di
San Lorenzo" ("The Night of San Lorenzo") (1982), Italian directors
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, both well into their seventies, dealt with
the human effects of persecution and political violence -- and with
the desire to rebel against fate. While "The Night of San Lorenzo,"
an episode from the Italian resistance movement against Mussolini's
fascist militia, managed to describe the senselessness of violence
with the tools of absurdist comedy, "The Lark Farm" is a deeply
dark melodrama.

In the political inferno the film portrays, Moritz Bleibtreu and Paz
Vega are perfectly cast as tragic lovers. "It is not a film against
Turkey, on the contrary," they say, and rightfully so. But the editors
who published the Danish cartoons that so inflamed the Muslim world
were also in the right. "The Lark Farm" could well become the political
scandal at this year's Berlinale.

Obedience, cowardice, expediencey and vileness

The screenplay, based on a novel by Antonia Arslan -- a literature
professor who now lives in Padua -- deals with the history of Arslan's
family. The novel portrays the Avakians, a respected middle-class
Armenian family that lives in a provincial city, hoping that things
will not take a turn for the worse. The film begins with intimate
scenes of beautiful faces and women wearing long dresses, filmed
in the light of a Vermeer painting. The family patriarch has died,
and even the Turkish Colonel Arkan (Andre Dussollier) bows to pay
his respects to the deceased.

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But then Arkan receives his orders from Istanbul, orders he promptly
obeys. In only a few scenes, the directors depict the mixture of
obedience and cowardice, of expediency and vileness that has always
made ethnic cleansing and pogroms possible.

The men and boys are crucified, castrated and hacked to pieces, and
the women are sent on a starvation march into the deserts of eastern
Anatolia. Nazim, a beggar (played by Palestinian filmmaker Mohammed
Bakri), betrays his masters but then regrets it and attempts to at
least help the women. Youssuf (Moritz Bleibtreu), a Turkish soldier,
is drawn to the family's proud surviving daughter (Paz Vega) and falls
in love with her. In an attempt to flee, Nunik sacrifices herself
to enable her nieces to escape. When Youssuf receives his orders --
"Throw them into the fire first, then cut off their heads" -- he
decapitates Nunik to save her from being burned alive.

The outstanding performances -- and the sheer incomprehensibility
of the events -- keep the film from descending into sentimentality,
despite the costumes and the over-abundance of stage blood. The
Tavianis have managed to produce images the film's viewers will regret
having seen, because these are the kinds of images one has trouble
forgetting. This is both the film's achievement and its curse.

Watching the film is almost unbearable. According to some eyewitnesses,
soldiers gave Armenian mothers the option of killing their newborn
boys themselves. Others say that women were forced to place their
babies in a rucksack and stand back-to-back with another woman,
their arms interlocked and... One doesn't want to know or see what
actually happened.

A muffled silence

This is what Vittorio Taviani has to say about it: "The murder of
the innocent has been a part of theater history since the Greeks,
since Shakespeare. Three years ago we discovered the Armenian tragedy,
almost by accident, when we read the book by Antonia Arslan. We wanted
to tell it with the means at our disposal."

Arsinee Khanjian, a Canadian of Armenian heritage who lost part of
her own family, plays the role of Armineh Avakian. In one scene the
severed head of her husband is thrown into her lap. "She was adamant
about acting in our film. She felt that it was a sort of obligation
to her murdered great-grandparents. We promised her that we would
only shoot this scene once, and without rehearsal," says Paolo
Taviani. "According to the script, she was supposed to scream. But
all that came out was a muffled silence. We left it that way."

The Armenians were Christians, often educated and affluent. As such,
they made for the ideal fifth column when the Ottoman Empire attacked
Russia. But the Ottomans lost the war. According to the official
version in Ankara, the Armenians had to be resettled during the war,
and most of them died as a result of disease and at the hands of
Kurdish tribes. But many contest that version.

"One million Armenians were murdered. This is something hardly anyone
dares to say," said Orhan Pamuk prior to his winning the Nobel Prize in
Literature. His words immediately made Pamuk the victim of nationalist,
hate-mongering propaganda. The persecution and murder of the Armenian
minority remains the foremost trauma of the founding of modern Turkey.

It was, in fact, the "young Turks," those who were eager to found a
new and modern state, who issued the orders which led to the deaths
of the Armenians. Recognizing the genocide as such would be tantamount
to admitting that the spiritual founders of modern Turkey were men who
today would be easily convicted of war crimes by the International War
Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. And yet the majority of officers charged
with crimes against the Armenians were promptly released after the war.

Efforts in vain

For the past 70 years, Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has had
plans to film the Armenian epic "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," by
Czech-born poet, playwright and novelist Franz Werfel. And Sylvester
Stallone has likewise recently indicated he would be interested
in making the movie. But the project was repeatedly shelved for
political reasons. Keeping NATO's eastern flank happy was apparently
more important that bringing justice to a minority that had already
been heavily decimated.

Even today the European Union avoids using the word "genocide,"
anxious not to cast a shadow on the negotiations over Turkey's bid
for EU membership.

The film is an Italian-French-Bulgarian-Spanish co-production.

Turkey's delegate to the European film fund Eurimage attempted to
put a stop to the Taviani project. But this time Turkey's efforts
were in vain.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,466427,00.html

Does UN act in Turkey's favor?

2007-02-02T12:30:00.001-05:00

Does UN act in Turkey's favor?

PanARMENIAN.Net

Does UN act in Turkey's favor?
 
Does it really make any difference how many people
were killed - one and a half million, six, or even if
only one person? Genocide is genocide, arithmetic is 
not needed here.
31.01.2007 GMT+04:00
   
On January 25 the UN General Assembly adopted a
Resolution condemning the denial of the Holocaust as
of a historical fact. The Document was supported by
103 countries out of the 192 Member States, no voting 
was held. The Resolution was submitted for
consideration on Tuesday by the US representative, it
contains a call to all the UN Member States for the
absolute denial of any doubts of the indisputability
of the Holocaust. 

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ No definite country was mentioned in
the document, however it was mentioned that `ignoring
the denial of the historical fact of the terrible
Holocaust runs the risk of its repetition'. The date 
was chosen in honor of the liberation day of the
prisoners of the largest concentration camp Oswiecim,
January 27, 1945. Laws banning the Holocaust denial
are applied in 9 EU Member States - Austria, Belgium, 
Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, the Slovak
Republic, France, and the Czech Republic. 

The adopted Resolution causes embarrassment. On the
one hand everything is quite obvious - genocide, in
its any kind of manifestation must be recognized and 
condemned. On the other hand it is a double standard
policy, which by the way shows its worth in its most
obnoxious form. The slaughter and deportation of 2
million Armenians in the Ottoman Turkey, which was
 placed on a national basis, is considered only `tragic
events of 1915'. Bewilderment is caused by another
article of the Resolution, which says that `ignoring
the historical fact of the terrible Holocaust runs the 
larger risk of its repetition'. This is what Armenia
has just been talking about for so long, mentioning
that if in due time the League of Nations had
recognized `the events of 1915' as a Genocide, it 
could have helped to avoid the Holocaust, or at least
the later wouldn't be on such a large scale. However
it did not, and thus impunity of the murders on racial
grounds followed one another. Nevertheless Hitler's 
famous phrase, which is denied by the Turkish
historians, was uttered. One very essential detail
should be mentioned here; according to some sources,
the slaughter of the Armenians, was `provoked' by
Germany, which was Turkey's ally in the First World 
War. The German advisors of course didn't call the
Turks to exterminate the Armenians, but they didn't
display great efforts to stop them from doing it
either. In 1915 the German Ambassador to Istanbul, 
Wangenheim was asked to stop the deportation, for he
was able to do that. But he didn't, grounding on the
absence of the instructions from Berlin. By the way,
according to some sources in 1915 Wangenheim died from 
cardiac rupture. It is said, he couldn't endure the
stories about the horror in Western Armenia. But all
this is already in the past, and we are more concerned
with the present, which is full of anti-Armenian 
propaganda disseminated by the Turkish Government.
`Historical indisputability of the Holocaust is
nothing but reality, and it must be condemned, but the
denial of the Armenian Genocide, which is still
continuing on a rather large scale, is of more vital 
importance than any case of the Holocaust denial. Here
the real point is that the Armenian Genocide must not
be disregarded. The Armenian Genocide was the first in
the XX Century and is immediately linked with the 
Holocaust, dated later. One should not put any
difference between them, as the denial of the Armenian
Genocide is the denial of the Holocaust. Besides, the
hypocrisy is obvious - even today Genocides are
committed in Darfur, Rwanda and the international 
community does very little to stop them', says expert
Richard Giragosyan. Another question that comes to
mind is; what are the politicians guided by while
adopting such Resolutions? Maybe by the number of the 
victims? Does it really make any difference how many
people were killed - - one and a half million, six, or
even if only one person? Genocide is genocide,
arithmetic is not needed here. Or else once again the 
Armenians become victims for the Turkey's sake, whose
turning its back to the West is completely undesired.

P

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AN ISSUE IN SWEDEN

2006-11-30T21:15:00.000-05:00

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AN ISSUE IN SWEDEN
by Afram Barryakoub

Spero News
Nov 29 2006

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has received an interpellation
from parliament demanding an investigation into finding of human
remains of genocide.

The finding of a mass grave in south eastern Turkey, believed to date
from the 1915 genocide of Assyrians and Armenians, and the Turkish
government's silence regarding the finding has prompted a debate in
the Swedish parliament on the matter.

It was on October 17 this year that villagers from Xirabebaba (Kuru)
in southeastern Turkey came across a mass grave when digging a grave
for one of their deceased. The villagers took pictures of the skulls
and bones in the mass grave before Turkish military came and blocked
the site.

The villagers were certain that they had found remains of victims of
the 1915 genocide. The military personnel forbade the villagers to
tell anyone about the site and then closed it. Some of the villagers
chose not to follow the orders of the military and told the story to
a local newspaper who followed up on the story.

As soon as the military learned that someone has leaked this
information to the press, they pressed the villagers to give the
names of those responsible for this. Since then journalists trying
to get near the mass grave have been denied access by the military.

Turkey still denies that its Christian population of Assyrians (also
called Chaldeans and Syriacs), Greeks and Armenians were subjected
to genocides. That could explain why the Turkish state and most of
the Turkish media has remained silent about the finding.

But now one of Turkey's most popular weekly magazines, Nokta,
has highlighted the mass grave finding with a cover story in the
latest issue with the main heading "Again acting the three monkeys -
a mass grave was found one month ago in Nusaybin and the jurisdiction,
execution and legislation bodies as well as the media are silent."

The writer, Talin Suciyan, accuses the Turkish state of turning a
deaf ear to the mass grave finding. "None of the three 'powers' of
our democracy, legislation, jurisdiction or execution made a move to
deal with the issue. And when the fourth power - the media - swept
the bones under the carpet (the Turkish) public remained completely
unaware of the issue." she writes.

In fact, the only Turkish group that has reacted to the finding is
the Turkish Human Rights Association who sent an open letter to the
ministry of interior calling for an investigation into the matter.

The mass grave finding has yet to enter Turkish politics but in Sweden
the matter has stirred up a debate on the highest levels, much due
to the efforts of the Assyrian Chaldean Syriac Association (ACSA).

The news about the mass finding was distributed by Tidningarnas
Telegrambyrå (TT), Sweden's top news agency and was thereafter
published in several Swedish media, including the two leading morning
papers Dagens Nyheter (DN) and Svenska Dagbladet (Svd).

As a result of the above the mass grave issue has now entered Swedish
politics as MP Hans Linde from the left party recently submitted an
interpellation to the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, asking
for an independent commission of scientists and historians to examine
the findings.

The foreign minister must now ask the foreign ministry to launch an
investigation into the matter before he can respond to MP Hans Linde.

The response of the foreign minister on this issue is due to be
presented on the 12 of December before parliament.

Turkey's 'New' Approaches In Armenian Genocide Issue

2006-11-28T16:47:00.000-05:00

TURKEY'S 'NEW' APPROACHES IN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ISSUE
By Kiro Manoyan

Yerkir, Armenia
Nov 27 2006

The "exciting" announcements that Turkey makes about applying new
tactics when dealing with the Armenian Genocide issue are nothing
more than a new packaging for the old tactics.

The aim is the same as before: to dispute the facts of the
Armenian Genocide for years with a goal to derail the process of
the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide. In other
words, this "new" tactics pursues the same goal as Turkish Prime
Minister Erdogan's 2005 proposal to set up a "bilateral commission of
historians," and by transforming the issue into a historical dispute,
remove it from the political agenda.

Speaking two days ago at a meeting that was discussing his ministry's
budget for the next year, Turkish Foreign Minister Gul said the
Armenian Genocide will be among the key issues for Turkey's foreign
policy in the coming ten years because it stands in the way of Turkey's
relations with many countries. He also said they were seeking advice
of Turkish and foreign lawyers for possibilities to take the case to
the "international court."

The Turkish foreign minister's vague description of the "international
court" was immediately explained by Turkish retired diplomats Sukru
Elekdag and Gunduz Aktan. Aktan, who was also a member of the infamous
Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission, spoke about it at a recent
lecturing tour to Canada.

It turned out that the "international court" is not the International
Court of Justice but the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Though both
courts operate in the same building in the Hague, their missions and
authorities are quite different as their names show.

Apparently, the Turkish diplomatic circles are trying to first of
all make a propaganda move. Aktan told Milliyet newspaper, "Though
the trial process may take 5-10 years, but it ensures us a moral
advantage now. If Armenia or France refuse to appear in the court,
they will be embarrassed in the world."

According to Aktan, the process of passing the Armenian Genocide to
the international law assumes: 1.Set up a commission to check the
reality of the documents kept in the archives of Turkey, Armenian
Patriarchate of Constantinople, Boston chapter of ARF, Russia, USA,
Germany, England and France; 2.Carry out statistical work to study the
ethnic changes of the population; 3.Study military movements and the
activities of the Armenian armed groups; 4.Find out the causes of the
deaths during the deportation; 5.Study the registration books of the
hospital for the period in question; 6.Though a forensic examination
determine the ethnicity of those buried in common graves.

The Turkish diplomats are trying to accomplish the goal that was
supposed to be reached by the failed "bilateral commission of
historians."

But the thing is that Article 9 of the 1948 Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly
states: "Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the
interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention,
including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide
or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3, shall be submitted
to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the
parties to the dispute."

In other words, the Turkish diplomats, violating the rules of the
Convention, plan to take the issue to another direction, knowing well
that Armenia has not signed under the 1899 and 1907 Hague conventions
that have set up the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

If the Turkish diplomacy really wants to take the problems between
Armenia and Turkey - of which the Armenian Genocide is just one part
- to the international law, the issues should first of all include
issues such: 1.Restoration of Turkey's eastern border as determined by
US President Wilson under the Sevres Treaty of August 10, 1920; 2.The
issue of non-validity of the December 2, 1920 Treaty of Alexandrapol;
3.The non-validity of the treaties signed on March 16, 1921 in Kars,
and on October 23, 1921 in Moscow; 4.Violation by Turkey since 1991
of the main principles set in the Kars Treaty; 5.The illegality of
replacing the 1920 Severs Treaty with the July 24, 1923 Lausanne
Treaty.

However, if Turkey wishes to determine its responsibility in the
Armenian Genocide through an international court, it should turn to
the International Court of Justice.

It is important to reveal the real goals and efficiency of this new
Turkish fraud for the international public opinion.

Bible verses

2006-11-26T19:08:00.000-05:00

Revelation 6:9-11 (New International Version)

9When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. 10They called out in a loud voice, "How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?" 11Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and brothers who were to be killed as they had been was completed.

Psalm 13

1. How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2. How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3. Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;
4. my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5. But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6. I will sing to the LORD,
for he has been good to me.

Psalm 42

9. I say to God my Rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?”
10. My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
11. Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.

Lamentations 5

1. Remember, O LORD, what has happened to us;
look, and see our disgrace.
2. Our inheritance has been turned over to aliens,
our homes to foreigners.
3. We have become orphans and fatherless,
our mothers like widows.
4. We must buy the water we drink;
our wood can be had only at a price.
5. Those who pursue us are at our heels;
we are weary and find no rest.

Remember The Armenian Genocide (link)

2006-11-26T18:48:00.000-05:00

This report is a collection of research articles offered as evidence of the veracity of the Genocide inflicted on the Armenian peoples by the Ottoman Empire, to justifiably qualify for inclusion in the commemoration of holocausts perpetrated throughout history.

http://www.rememberarmenia.co.uk/

Turkey can one day destroy the celebration of Christmas

2006-10-18T21:05:00.001-04:00

Christmas was once celebrated in Constantinople, today,s Istanbul this was once the center of the Christian world, but you would never know it today.

St Sophia Christianities, oldest Vassilica built one thousand years before St. Peters in Rome is now surrounded by Minnerets
and it's big cross has been replaced by a crescent.

St Sophia was spared the wrecking ball thanks to former US president Carter who intervened on behalf of the Christian community in the US, at the very last moment.

The seminary in Halki remains closed and the Ecumenical patriarchate can't even use his title , all this by a country which claims to be European and ready to join our society.

The reality is Turkey has virtualy cleansed all Christian Europeans from what was once their ancesteral homelands. The number should be over 5,000,000 European Christians instead of just a few thousand ironically this was the very same land that Turkey uses to claim European identity.

What should be further evidence is Northern EU Cyprus where since the Turkish invasion of the island since 1974 over 200,000 Christian Cypriots have been force off their homes and land and their monesteries, and churches have virtually all been looted and destroyed.

To ignore the horror of the Armenian Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of the Christian communities in Asia Minor and Constantinople without so much as an apology is a crime by weak incompetent EU leaders who are paving the way for the destruction of Europe.

Additional proof came when EU leaders came together to finalize the draft of the EU constitution when Turkish leaders who aren't even members showd up and demanded that that Classical Greece and Roman law be strcken from the original draft as the foundation of Europe. A EU without it's European heritage is what Turkey wants.

Turkey claims secular but has managed to cleanse virtually all Christianity from it's path.

Merry Christmas

Genocide Acknowledgment: A Dead End?

2006-10-18T21:00:00.001-04:00

enocide Acknowledgment: A Dead End?

Genocide Acknowledgment: A Dead End?

[April 24, 2005]

Worldwide Armenian political demands on Turkey have always included land, restitution, and Genocide acknowledgment. Over time, however, the demand for acknowledgment has eclipsed the other demands.

In view of the obvious obstacles the land and restitution issues have faced, that's understandable.

Genocide acknowledgment is different. Armenians, and many non-Armenians, have readily rallied around such a straightforward and relatively non-aggressive demand. Moreover, a Turkish confession - apparently a mere sentence or two - has seemed achievable.

Suppose, therefore, that Turkey 's Prime Minister announced today that " Turkey acknowledges that 90 years ago, during a time in which both Turks and Armenians were murdered, some individuals in the Ottoman regime committed genocide against Armenians. Let us and Armenia now begin a new era."

Dead End

Would that really heal our collective psyche? Would it be sincere and signify a genuine shift in Turkish attitudes? Would Turkish organizations and individuals cease their Genocide denial? Would the remaining survivors and their descendants receive restitution/reparations?

Would Armenia 's security be measurably enhanced? Would Turkey open its border with Armenia ? Would it end its pan-Turkic thrust - similar to the one that spawned the Genocide - into the Caucasus and Central Asia ? Could Armenians resettle in Anatolia/Western Armenia? Would Armenia recover even small amounts of that territory?

That the likely answer to each question is "No" should cause us to rethink our emphasis on acknowledgment. Among the political scientists doing that are Dr. Simon Payaslian, Nicolas Tavitian MS, and Dr. Khatchik Der Ghougassian (Armenian Forum, Vol. 2, No. 3, Gomidas.org).

Rethinking Acknowledgment

The "essential component" of "historic Armenian lands," says Payaslian, has been "redefined as, or totally replaced by, recognition." Western countries' "commemorative statements that ignore the territorial issue should be rejected."

He lists four goals of acknowledgment: territory, emotional healing, restitution, and enhanced international standing for Armenia . Only the last, Payaslian concludes, is realistically achievable through acknowledgment.

He is troubled by "the lack of public debate" on the "purposes and problems" of "Genocide recognition."

So is Tavitian: "Striving for genocide recognition has long been a reflex rather than an action toward a goal ... Armenians should rethink their approach."

However, acknowledgment could be a "security guarantee" for Armenia if it can "transform Turkey [and] the West's understanding of Armenia 's security."

The quest for acknowledgment, Der Ghougassian believes, maintains "vigilance against the Turkish threat." Acknowledgment might be a "first step" towards "normalization of relations." Nevertheless, "A response to the Genocide must deprive Turkey " of the land it took in the genocide.

Clearly, then, we need to rethink the pursuit of acknowledgment. If not, we may regret it.

Land and Restitution

The European Union (EU), which Turkey aspires to join, is asking Turkey to recognize the Genocide. Suppose Turkey complies.

The EU and the US would likely conclude, since the land and restitution issues are not now prominently on the table, that Armenians had received everything they had asked for. For Armenians to subsequently try to drag those two issues into the spotlight would be difficult. And, as argued above, acknowledgment alone is unlikely to benefit Armenia much anyway.

Worse, an educated guess is that the West would accept a sham acknowledgment, such as " Turkey regrets the wrongful murder of Armenians in 1915 by the old Ottoman regime."

Frankly, acknowledgment, in the absence of the restoration of Armenian rights, may be undesirable. The pursuit of acknowledgment, rather than acknowledgment itself, helps to maintain a strong defensive posture against Turkey and is a valuable tool to keep Armenia 's foe off balance.

Placing restitution and territory near the front of our agenda, therefore, serves two purposes. First, Turkey is unlikely to issue an acknowledgment at all, for fear of the consequences. Second, if an acknowledgment does come, Turkey and the West would less able to close the book on the Armenian case.

In the meantime, efforts are underway to undermine the restitution and land issues.

State Department Trap

John Evans, the US Ambassador to Armenia , and David L. Phillips, a State Department consultant and moderator of the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC), recently toured the US gleefully claiming that Armenians cannot ask for restitution or land from Turkey .

They cite a 2003 "report" sponsored by TARC. The report affirmed the factuality of the genocide, but deviously asserted that the UN's1948 Genocide Treaty cannot be applied retroactively to 1915 and that "legal, financial, or territorial" claims are invalid.

Indeed, Phillips hints that four years ago it was he who arranged for President Robert Kocharian to tell Turkish TV that Armenia will not press for restitution or territory.

This, then, is the trap being laid for us: the US, and possibly Turkey , may someday issue a Genocide "acknowledgment", but Armenians must abandon all claims, particularly territorial ones, against Turkey .

Why is America worried about Turkish territory? Because the State Department, not to mention Europe and Israel , regards eastern Turkey as a vital path to the Caspian Sea region's oil and gas. By disposing of Genocide acknowledgment and trashing Armenian land claims, the State Department hopes to both protect eastern Turkey and more easily penetrate the Caucasus .

The Future

Genocide acknowledgment is a vital, and perhaps permanent, weapon in Armenia and the Diaspora's arsenals. It must not be dealt away cheaply.

Armenia and the traditional Diasporan political parties should immediately place land and restitution alongside, or close to, the acknowledgment demand.

Realistically, of course, Armenia cannot recover territory anytime soon. Still, that territory is vital for long-term security. For example, Armenia requires a secure path to the Black Sea and, therefore, to Europe and Russia . Needless to say, to attain that goal, Armenia must become much stronger. (See "The Armenian Land Question: Misunderstood Terrain," Horizon Weekly, September 6, 2004.)

Recovering territory and obtaining material restitution someday will heal our wounds more than all the Turkish acknowledgments in the world. Notice, for example, that as Armenians now control Karabagh and the surrounding territory, the repression and massacres that Azerbaijan inflicted on Armenians in the last 100 years take a back seat.

Winning, therefore, is the best revenge, though we will always honor those who perished and suffered in the Genocide.

Lastly, we need to better educate ourselves about land and restitution. Genocide related commemorations, lectures, and conferences should emphasize the ongoing geopolitical consequences of 1915: loss of historic lands and individual and historical property, and an adversary that remains committed to a dangerous, pan-Turkic philosophy. Younger generations, particularly - by nature action-oriented - crave such meaty political issues.

And if Turkey never acknowledges the Genocide? Security, and the restoration of rights and the Armenian homeland are more important.

David B. Boyajian

The author is an Armenian American freelance writer

Prove Hitler wrong

2006-10-13T09:17:00.000-04:00

Prove Hitler wrong

Remember Ottoman Turkey's slaughter of Armenian Christians

WORLD Magazine
October 23, 2004
Page 52

By Marvin Olasky

Editor's warning: This article contains graphic material.

VAN, Turkey -- As Turkey moves toward eventual membership in the
European Union (see Madisonian Turkey from this week's issue), this
Muslim nation should also come to grips with a terrible crime that has
gone largely unpunished.

Armenians, many of them Christian, lived in this area of what is now
eastern Turkey for about 2,000 years. Despite suffering massacres in
1894 and 1895 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, they still numbered
well over 1 million in 1914. Ten years later only scattered handfuls
were left.

Adolf Hitler used what is now called the Armenian holocaust as his model
for an even greater holocaust. Ottoman Turks developed techniques later
used by the Nazis, such as piling 90 people into a train car with a
capacity of 36, and leaving them locked in for days, terrified,
starving, and often dead.

Hitler was even more impressed with how the Turks got away with
genocide. When Hitler on Aug. 22, 1939, explained that his plans to
invade Poland included the formation of death squads that would
exterminate men, women, and children, he asked, "Who, after all, speaks
today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

In recent years some have. Books such as Peter Balakian's The Burning
Tigris (HarperCollins, 2003) tell of the Armenian tragedy in a way that
also helps us to understand radical Islam. That's because the key
incitement to massacre came on Nov. 14, 1914, when Mustafa Hayri Bey,
the Ottoman Empire's leading Sunni authority, urged his followers to
commence a jihad: One pamphlet declared, "He who kills even one
unbeliever . . . shall be rewarded by Allah."

The jihad proclamation received wide dissemination. When a priest asked
a Muslim army officer how he could participate in killing several
thousand Armenian women, Captain Shukri's answer was simple: It was
jihad time, and after the murders he could "spread out my prayer rug and
pray, giving glory to Allah and the Prophet who made me worthy of
personally participating in the holy jihad in these days of my old age."

The Ottoman Turk government set up and paid special killing squads. The
Ministry of the Interior gave instructions to "exterminate all males
under 50, priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be
Islamized." Historians and journalists have estimated that Turks killed
800,000 to 1 million Armenians in 1915 alone, and an additional 200,000
to 500,000 over the next seven years.

Here in Van 89 years ago, provincial governor Jevdet Bey gained the
nickname "the horseshoe master" because he nailed horseshoes to the feet
of Armenians. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to Turkey,
described in 1918 testimony of torture he had heard: "The gendarmes
would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood--evidently in imitation of
the Crucifixion, and then while the sufferer writhes in his agony, they
would cry, 'Now let your Christ come help you.'"

Aurora Mardiganian, the only member of her family to survive, told of
killing squads that planted their swords in the ground, blade up, at
intervals of several yards. Killers on horseback each grabbed a girl,
rode their horses at a controlled gallop, and tried to throw the girl so
she would be impaled on a sword: "If the killer missed and the girl was
only injured, she would be scooped up again until she was impaled on the
protruding blade."

The silent film Ravished Armenia, based on Aurora Mardiganian's account,
caused a U.S. sensation--but British officials demanded before showtime
in London the deletion of a scene of Armenian women being crucified.
Miss Mardiganian agreed that the scene, which showed the women being
crucified on large crosses with their long hair covering their nude
bodies, was inauthentic.

The scene was inaccurate, she said, because the crosses in the film were
large, but in reality they were little and pointed: "They took the
clothes off the girls. They made them bend down. And after raping them,
they made them sit on the pointed wood, through . . ." Americans, she
said, "can't show such terrible things" (and I can't write about them in
full detail).

After the World War ended in 1918 several Turks, including "the
horseshoe master," were executed for war crimes. Hundreds of
perpetrators went free, and to this day Turkish textbooks cover up the
slaughter of Armenians, as they also cover up the slaughter of Greek
Christians in western Turkey during that same era.
Prove Hitler wrong. Governments are to wield the sword to bring justice,
so remember Armenian and other victims of governments that killed their
own people, and thank God that the United States has worked to protect
innocent people in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan.

http://www.worldmag.com/displayarticle.cfm?id=9808

Genocide Scholars Call on Turkey to Acknowledge Armenian Genocide

2006-10-12T19:40:00.001-04:00

GENOCIDE SCHOLARS CALL ON TURKEY TO
END DENIAL OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

-- ANCA Welcomes Open Letter by Leaders of the
International Association of Genocide Scholars

WASHINGTON, DC - The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA)
has welcomed an open letter by leaders of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) calling on Turkey to end
its campaign of denial of the Armenian Genocide and urging the
Turkish government to accept responsibility for this crime against
humanity.

The open letter, dated April 6th and first reported by Bloomberg
News on April 14th, was signed by Robert Robert Melson, the
President of the IAGS; Israel Charny, Vice-President of the
Association, and; New York Times Best-Selling author Peter
Balakian, who holds the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor
of the Humanities at Colgate University. These scholars wrote in
response to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's call for an "impartial
investigation" of the fate of the Armenians in Turkey in 1915.

"We very much appreciate the strong leadership, academic integrity,
and moral clarity of professors Melson, Charney, and Balakian in
challenging Prime Minister Erdogan's cynical attempt to force an
artificial debate on an issue that is thoroughly documented and
universally accepted - except by the few remaining academic
mercenaries in the service of Turkey's state-controlled
institutions," said Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the ANCA.

Speaking on behalf of the "the major body of scholars who study
genocide in North America and Europe," the authors of the letter
noted that the "Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by
thousands of official records of the United States and nations
around the world including Turkey's wartime allies Germany, Austria
and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness
accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of
survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship."

The letter went on to stress that, "there may be differing
interpretations of genocide - how and why the Armenian Genocide
happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is
not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to
absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical
meaning of this history."

"We would also note that scholars who advise your government and
who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled
institutions are not impartial. Such so-called "scholars" work to
serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they
advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian
Genocide," the letter continued. "We believe that it is clearly in
the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and
equal participant in international, democratic discourse to
acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the
genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and
people have done in the case of the Holocaust."

Commenting on the letter, Hamparian added: "Clearly, the
international pressure is growing on Turkey, and Ankara is finding
itself increasingly isolated in its campaign of genocide denial.
Unfortunately, rather than following the post World War II German
model of accepting responsibility - as suggested in this letter -
the Turkish government has responded, internally, by outlawing
discussion of the Armenian Genocide - through Section 306 of their
new penal code, and, abroad, in the form of aggressive, but
increasingly transparent, efforts to deny the truth, engage in
diversionary tactics, and escape justice for its crime."

The full text of the letter is provided below.

#####

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS

President: Robert Melson (USA)
Vice-President: Israel Charny (Israel)
Secretary-Treasurer: Steven Jacobs (USA)

Respond to: Robert Melson, Professor of Political Science Purdue
University, West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA

April 6, 2005

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
TC Easbakanlik
Bakanlikir
Ankara, Turkey
FAX: 90 312 417 0476

Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:

We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an
"impartial study by historians" concerning the fate of the Armenian
people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North
America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an
impartial study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully
aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on
the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition
of the United Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore
that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian
Genocide but it is hundreds of independent scholars, who have no
affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries
and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence
reveals the following:

On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk
government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its
Armenian citizens ~V an unarmed Christian minority population. More
than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing,
starvation, torture, and forced death marches. Another million fled
into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged
from its homeland of 2,500 years.

The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of
its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United
States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented
by thousands of official records of the United States and nations
around the world including Turkey's wartime allies Germany, Austria
and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness
accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of
survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.

The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international
scholarly, legal, and human rights community:

1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide
in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the
Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he
meant by genocide.

2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide.

3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an
organization of the world's foremost experts on genocide,
unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian
Genocide.

4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and
Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000
declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide" and
urging western democracies to acknowledge it.

5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), the
Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the
historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.

6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as
William A. Schabas's Genocide in International Law (Cambridge
University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor
to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against
humanity.

We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide -
how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual
and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but
in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the
victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.

We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who
are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled
institutions are not impartial. Such so-called "scholars" work to
serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they
advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian
Genocide.

We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people
and their future as a proud and equal participant in international,
democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a
previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just
as the German government and people have done in the case of the
Holocaust.

Sincerely,

[signed]
Robert Melson
Professor of Political Science
President, International Association of Genocide Scholars

[signed]
Israel Charny
Vice President, International Association of Genocide Scholars
Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide

[signed]
Peter Balakian
Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities
Colgate University

Templates for Gross Denial of a Known Genocide: A Manual

2006-10-10T15:12:00.001-04:00

emplates for Gross Denial of a Known Genocide: A Manual

As everybody knows, the Turkish government denies the Armenian Genocide, so do most of the people who live in Turkey.
This will be easy for Turks to deny it and much easier for non-Turks to understand the pshychology of denial.

Israel Charny outlines the tactics of denial in "Templates for Gross Denial of a Known Genocide: A Manual," in The Encyclopedia of Genocide, volume 1, page 168.

1. Question and minimize the statistics. Turks will argue that less than 1 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, thus 1.5 million people could not get killed.

2. Attack the motivations of the truth-tellers. Say that Armenians are Russian spies and they speak of Genocide to harm Turkey.

3. Claim that the deaths were inadvertent. Turks will say that Armenians were deported to other places for their own good.

4. Emphasize the strangeness of the victims. Turks will continue to call Armenians gavurs (non-believers), who owned Turkey's economy.

5. Rationalize the deaths as the result of tribal conflict. Deniers will say that Turks also died, it was a civil war.

6. Blame "out of control" forces for committing the killings. Turks will say there was a war and the government could not watch the bandits who killed Armenians.

7. Avoid antagonizing the genocidists, who might walk out of "the peace process." Turks will "prove" that by speaking of Genocide, Armenians make hatred among the Turkish and Armenian governments.

8. Justify denial in favor of current economic interests. Turks will say that Armenian Genocide's recognition will be an economic threat to the world.

9. Claim that the victims are receiving good treatment. Turks say that Armenians were protected by their Ottoman government in 1915.

10. Claim that what is going on doesn't fit the definition of genocide. Turks say the term "genocide" was coined in 1944 and the Armenian killings did not match the word.

EU-Turkey & the Armenian Genocide- Part I

2006-10-05T12:11:00.001-04:00

Written by Dr Harry Hagopian

Monday, 24 October 2005
Audere est Facere!
Calls on Turkey to recognise the Armenian Genocide;
considers this recognition to be a pre-requisite for
accession to the European Union; European Parliament
Resolution (28 September 2005).

Image Across much of Europe, the last ten months have
been buzzing with discussions about the Armenian
Genocide. This is not solely because Armenians
worldwide have been commemorating in 2005 the 90th
anniversary of the genocide. Nor is it necessarily
because this gruesome chapter in early 20th century
history awoke the collective conscience of the world
toward recognition. Rather, it is largely due to the
ongoing negotiations regarding Turkey's accession to
the EU. It is inevitable that Armenians, and their
supporters across the Union, have been pressuring
Turkey to come clean on the chapter of their history
that deals with the 'Armenian Question' during WWI,
and have repeatedly requested from their governments
to include the recognition of the genocide as a
precondition in their discussions for Turkish
accession to the EU. Consequently, this Armenian
position has become congruent with that of the
European Parliament as evidenced by its latest
Resolution of 28th September in Strasbourg.

On 3 October 2005, the EU and Turkey finally signed a
negotiating framework that would allow formal talks
and screening processes to begin on Turkish membership
of the European Club. There was the obligatory
last-minute brinkmanship, with Austria demanding the
insertion of an additional clause that referred to
privileged partnership rather than full membership.
However, this objection was overcome with a Croatian
compromise, and the question now is to explore what
happens in the next ten to fifteen years when
negotiations between the EU and Turkey cover the 35
chapters (including judiciary and fundamental rights
as well as justice, freedom and security, in chapters
23 & 24 respectively) and Turkey's need to adapt its
political, economic and social system in such a manner
that it implements 80,000 pages of EU laws. This,
after all, is the EU-Turkey political dossier today,
and the critical period in the years ahead will decide
between an EU that insists upon the candidate country
Turkey to accept the acquis comminautaire of the Union
or a Turkey that dictates more or less its own terms
of accession to the EU.

Principle 6 of the EU Negotiating Framework for Turkey
clearly stipulates that the advancement of
negotiations will be guided by Turkey's progress in
preparing for accession. Such progress would include
the Copenhagen criteria (with the stability of
institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law,
human rights and respect for and protection of
minorities) as much as Turkey's 'unequivocal
commitment to good neighbourly relations and its
undertaking to resolve any outstanding border disputes
in accordance with the United Nations Charter,
including if necessary jurisdiction of the
International Court of Justice'. Olli Rehn, European
Commissioner for Enlargement, told the European
Parliament earlier that "the start of the negotiations
will give a strong push for those in Turkey who want
to reform the country to meet the European values of
rule of law and human rights; they are also a way for
the EU to have leverage on the direction of these
reforms".

But let me recap for a moment. On 22nd September, I
attended a conference in Brussels entitled December
2004-October 2005: Has Turkey changed? During the
final plenary session, the discussions led to the
unavoidable conclusion that the EU Commission was
doing its utmost to justify the start of accession
talks despite an implicit admission that Turkey had
not yet met all the criteria for the start-up of
negotiations. This EU position could prove
disconcerting if it were to accentuate the yawning
chasm between the political decisions adopted by the
EU institutions (namely the Commission and Council)
and the European population across the whole Union.
After all, a recent Eurobarometer poll revealed that
only 35% of EU citizens support Turkish membership,
and yet the EU institutions are not heeding to the
concerns of their constituencies but are proving why
the 'disconnect' is growing alarmingly larger between
an institutional and bureaucratic Union and its
peoples. In fact, this phenomenon became abundantly
evident when France and the Netherlands rejected the
EU draft constitution on 29 May and 1 June 2005
respectively as an instrument - with much merit, I
still maintain - that was nonetheless being imposed
upon the European peoples without adequate
consultation, coherence, transparency or feedback. (To
be continued 25/10/05)

Dr Harry Hagopian

EU-Turkey & the Armenian Genocide-Part II

2006-10-05T12:10:00.003-04:00

Written by Dr Harry Hagopian
Tuesday, 25 October 2005
(Previous) Audere est Facere!
Calls on Turkey to recognise the Armenian Genocide;
considers this recognition to be a pre-requisite for
accession to the European Union; European Parliament
Resolution (28 September 2005).

II. But what about the Armenian Genocide in the
overall context of EU-Turkey dossier?

Image There have been quite a few developments within
Turkey that have highlighted the inherent paradoxes of
the Turkish mindset on this human rights issue. There
has also been a tug-of-war between progressives and
reactionaries on the one hand, and between the small
minority of Turks openly addressing the issue of the
genocide and an ignorant or fearful majority who
maintain the denial that has typified Turkey for the
past 90 years.

One of the most prominent issues in the past few
months that highlights Turkey's non-EU credentials to
date as much as its paranoia about the Armenian
Genocide, is the case of Orhan Pamuk, one of Turkey's
most acclaimed contemporary writers. On 1st September,
a district prosecutor indicted Pamuk under Article
301(1) of the Turkish penal code for having 'blatantly
belittled Turkishness" by his "denigrating" remarks.
Pamuk's crime was to have given an interview in the
Swiss Tages Anzeiger newspaper on 6th February
stating that Turkey was responsible for the deaths of
1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds during WWI but
that nobody within the country dared speak about this
genocide. If convicted at his trial that starts on
16th December, Pamuk could well face up to three years
in gaol. Article 301/1 of the Turkish penal code
states that 'a person who explicitly insults being a
Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly,
shall be sentenced to a penalty of imprisonment for a
term of six months to three years … Where insulting
being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a
foreign country, the penalty shall be increased by one
third'.

This case came almost at the same time as that of
Hrant Dink, editor of the bilingual Agos magazine who
received a suspended six-month sentence in Istanbul on
7th October for writing a column that allegedly
insulted Turkey, and for telling an audience in 2002
that he was not a Turk but an Armenian of Turkey.
According to PEN International, fifty writers,
journalists and publishers currently face trials in
Turkey. The International Publishers' Association, in
its deposition to the UN, has also described the
revised Turkish penal code as being 'deeply flawed'.
It is questionable how a country such as Turkey that
has ratified both the UN International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the European
Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) could flout the
fundamental freedom of expression and continue to
enforce a penal code that is contrary to such
universal and EU-friendly principles. No wonder
therefore that Fethiye Cetin, Dink's lawyer, averred
that the ruling against her client showed how little
had changed under Turkey's new criminal code, despite
international and internal pressures.

With those Turkish manoeuvres, Orhan Pamuk and Hrant
Dink have joined a long list of cognoscenti and
literati such as Kemal Tahir and Fakir Baykurt who
have been muzzled by the state for expressing their
viewpoints. Numerous international bodies, such as the
Commissioners of the US Helsinki Commission, have sent
letters to the Turkish Prime Minister calling upon him
to authorise the dropping of charges against the
writer. In an Opinion in the Turkish Daily News, Semih
Ydyz wrote critically, "Anti-EU forces that are using
the legal system to bound people like Orhan Pamuk and
Hrant Dink may believe they are doing a great service
to the country. They don't realise, however, that they
are doing the opposite ... They are exposing the
outmoded system of thought for what it is and forcing
progressive Turks to rally around principles like
respect for freedom of thought".

This Turkish imbedded sense of nationalism, dissimilar
to patriotism, was manifested again in the deferrals
of an international conference entitled Ottoman
Armenians in the Period of the Collapse of the Empire:
Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy.
Many people, from the Turkish Minister of Justice to a
lawyer from one of the districts of Istanbul, tried
twice to cancel this conference. However, it finally
took place at Bilgi University in Istanbul on 24th
September. As the Economist wrote in an article
entitled Too soon for Turkish delight on 29th
September, "For Turks who want a European future,
there was a dollop of hope last weekend, when brave
historians managed to hold a conference in Istanbul to
discuss the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. It was the
first time Turkish pundits were permitted to challenge
publicly the official line, holding that the mass
deportation of Armenians in 1915 did not amount to a
conspiracy to kill them. As participants read out
letters between the 'Young Turks' then ruling the
empire, a rapt audience was left with no doubt that
hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deliberately
slain". In the words of Halil Berktay, coordinator of
the history department at Sabançi University and
participant at the conference, 'This is a country of
more than 70 million, with a strong nationalist past;
there are strong forces opposed to the European Union,
to democracy and opening up'. Berktay added that 'the
question of what happened in 1915-1916 is not a
mystery, it's not like we know just 5 percent, so the
question is not finding more evidence. The question is
liberating scholarship from the nationalist taboos …'

Fatma Muge Goçek, a sociologist at the University of
Michigan and advisor to the conference, said that
'Turkey has to confront its history, and the fact of
the violence of 1915 and 1916, and lack of
accountability, sanctioned more [state] violence'.
Equally, Elif Shafak, a social scientist and renowned
novelist whose works include The Flea Palace and who
recently captured the cultural voices of Turkey in
Street of the Cauldron Makers (Kazançi Yokushu),
published an editorial in the Washington Post on 25th
September entitled In Istanbul, a Crack in the Wall of
Denial. She wrote, "I also got to know other Turks who
were making a similar intellectual journey. Obviously
there is still a powerful segment of Turkish society
that completely rejects the charge that Armenians were
purposely exterminated. Some even go so far as to
claim that it was Armenians who killed Turks, and so
there is nothing to apologise for. These nationalist
hardliners include many of our government officials,
bureaucrats, diplomats and newspaper columnists. They
dominate Turkey's public image - but theirs is only
one position held by Turkish citizens, and it is not
even the most common one. The prevailing attitude of
ordinary people toward the 'Armenian question' is not
one of conscious denial; rather it is collective
ignorance. These Turks feel little need to question
the past as long as it does not affect their daily
lives". Shafak concluded her editorial about the
conference, "Whatever happens with the conference, I
believe one thing remains true: Through the collective
efforts of academics, journalists, writers and media
correspondents, 1915 is being opened to discussion in
my homeland [Turkey] as never before. The process is
not an easy one and will disturb many vested
interests. I know how hard it is - most children from
diplomatic families, confronting negative images of
Turkey abroad, develop a sort of defensive
nationalism, and it's especially true among those of
us who lived through the years of Armenian terrorism.
But I also know that the journey from denial to
recognition is one that can be made".

As Begle, another Turkish historian and a contemporary
of Selim Beligir, opined much along the same lines
during the conference in Istanbul, "The younger
generation in Turkey knows nothing about the events in
the early 20th century and the reason is the
educational system. [] The Armenian Question is one of
the darkest pages of our history, and naturally no one
wants to admit it. People who want to revisit and
discuss the problem gave gathered in this university".
Another speaker at the conference, historian Fikret
Adanir, stated outright that the killings constituted
genocide whilst Cengiz Candar, a prominent columnist
for the Bugun newspaper in Turkey wrote, "The
judiciary is one of the most reactionary and backward
institutions in Turkey, and the illegal [court]
verdict reflects the inherent problems. [] But the
fact that we are discussing this is ample evidence to
be optimistic". (To be continued 26/10/05)